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The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvem
by xnx 8mo ago
The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements).
Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
- HPsquared 8mo agoSSDs were such a revolution though, and a really rewarding upgrade. I'd fit SSDs to friend and family computers as an upgrade.
- sigmoid10 8mo agoI once had a decade old Thinkpad that suddenly became my new work laptop once more thanks to an SSD. It's a true shame they simply don't make them like this anymore.
- micv 8mo agoGetting my first SSD was absolutely the best computer upgrade I've ever bought. I didn't even realise how annoying load times were because I was so used to them and coming from C64s and Amigas even spinning rust seemed fairly quick. It took a long time before I felt a need to improve my PC's performance again after that.
- coffeebeqn 8mo agoThere were quite a few mind blowing upgrades back in the day. The first sound card instead of PC beeper was one of my most memorable moments. I remember loading up Doom, plugging my shitty earplugs that had a barely long enough cable and hearing the “real” shotgun sound for the first time. Oo-wee
- dcminter 8mo agoJust before I installed an SSD was the last time I owned a computer that felt slow.
- patwolf 8mo agoI owe much of my career to an SSD. I had a work laptop that I upgraded myself with an 80GB Intel SSD, which was pretty exotic at the time. It was so fast at grepping through code that I could answer colleagues’ questions about the code in nearly real time. It was like having a superpower.
- st_goliath 8mo ago> The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. About a week ago, completely out of the blue, YouTube recommended this old gem to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM A Pentium 4, overclocked to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling. Watching this was such an amazing throwback. I remember clearly the last time I saw it, which was when an excited friend showed it to me on a PC at our schools library. A year or so before YouTube even existed. By 2005, my Pentium 4 Prescott at home had some 3.6GHz without overclocking, 4GHz models for the consumer market were already announced (but plagued by delays), but surely 10GHz was "just a few more years away".
- fnord77 8mo agoonly just last year did someone goose a PC cpu to 9.13ghz https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/core-i9-14900kf-overclocked-to-9-13-ghz-to-become-the-highest-clocked-cpu-of-all-time-13-mhz-faster-than-the-previous-record-holder https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/core-i9-1490...
- accrual 8mo agoIIRC, part of the GHz problem is that very long pipelines like that of the Pentium 4 tend to show increasing benefits at higher clocks. If you can keep the pipeline full then the system reaps the benefits. Sort of like a drag racer - goes very fast in a straight line but terrible on corners. But with longer pipelines comes larger penalties when the pipeline needs to be flushed, so the P4 eventually hit a wall and Intel returned to the late Pentium 3 Tualatin core, refining it into the Pentium M which later evolved into the first Core CPUs.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago> Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs. "Bananas" core-counts gave me the same experience. Some year ago I moved to Ryzen Threadripper and experienced similar "Wow, compiling this project is now 4x faster" or "processing this TBs of data is now 8x faster", but of course it's very specific to specific workloads where concurrency and parallism is thought of from the ground up, not a general 2x speed up in everything.
- geon 8mo agoGPUs for 3d graphics were a game changer. I can see why you wouldn’t consider it as impactful if you weren’t into gaming at the time.
- dlcarrier 8mo agoIn my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) the steady across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each individual computer, but trickled their way into market saturation over a generation or two of computers, so you'd be effectively running the same software but in a much more responsive environment.
- vachina 8mo ago> Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago. I feel this. Humanity has peaked.
- accrual 8mo agoEvery time Discord updates (which is often) I'm like "cool, slightly more code to run on the same hardware..."
- idiotsecant 8mo agoThis is silly. That's like saying that machines haven't gotten any better because a helicopter doesn't eat any less hay than a horse did.
- dlcarrier 8mo agoI don't follow your analogy. Can you elaborate?
- anthk 8mo agoDebian Sarge, Kopete with KDE3: 256M of RAM, AMD Athlon 2000. Windows 11, Discord: 4GB are not enough to run it well. FYI, Kopete allowed inline LaTeX, Youtube videos (low res, ok, 480p maybe, but it worked), emoticos, animations, videoconference, themes, maybe basic HTML tags and whatnot. And it ran fast.
- rr808 8mo agoI still remember my first CPU with a heatsink. It seemed like a temporary dumb hack.
- oso2k 8mo agoI had the same inclination back in the 90s when I upgraded my Cyrix 486 SLC2 50MHz without a heat sink (which seems like a no-no in retrospect) to Cyrix MediaGX 133MHz. The stocker fan was immediately noticeable. I thought I had done something wrong.
- myself248 8mo agoUpgrading and Repairing PCs 4th edition even says directly, that some shady resellers will put a heatsink on a chip that they're running beyond spec, but that Intel designs all their processors to run at rated speed without one.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoI've never seen a Xeon without a heat sink, I don't believe they are designed to run without one.
- rr808 8mo agoThe first Xeon looks to be released 1998, so sounds about right
- jasomill 8mo agoIndeed, even the oldest, slowest Xeons shipped in SECC cartridges with integrated heatsinks. But that was several years after the book cited by the GP was published (1994, shortly after the release of the original Pentium).
- SoftTalker 8mo agoAh I missed that on my first read, was more focused on the claim at the end of the sentence. Thanks.
- jmyeet 8mo agoThat wasn't how it worked. Up until the 486, the clock speed and bus speed were basically the same and topped out at about 33MHz (IIRC). The 486 started the thing of making the CPU speed a multiple of the bus speed eg 486dx2/66 (33MHz CPU, 66MHz bus), 486dx4/100 (25MHz CPU, 100MHz bus). And that's continued to this day (kind of). But the point is the CPU became a lot faster than the IO speed, including memory. So these "overdrive" CPUs were faster but not 2-4x faster. Also, in terms of impact, yeah there was a massive incrase in performance through the 1990s but let's not forget the first consumer GPUs, namely 3dfx Voodoo and later NVidia and ATI. Oh, Matrox Millenium anyone? It's actually kind of wild that NVidia is now a trillion dollar company. It listed in 1998 for $12/share and adjusted for splits, Google is telling me it's ~3700x now.
- giantrobot 8mo agoYou got your multipliers backwards with the 486dx. The multipliers was on the CPU core rather than the bus. A dx2 was twice the memory bus speed. The dx4 was (confusingly) three times the bus speed. So a 486dx4/100 was a 33MHz bus with a 100MHz core.
- varispeed 8mo agoI don't know. I felt this way when switching from Intel laptop to Apple M1. I am still using it today and I prefer it over desktop PC.
- embedding-shape 8mo agoHave you ever used proper desktop computers? I suppose such a move would feel significant if you've mostly been using laptops.
- philistine 8mo agoBut that's the thing; a laptop is fundamentally different. Of course if there's the equivalent of a thermopump under my desk I'm going to get crazy performance. The magic was that Apple brought the uncompromised experience to a laptop.
- Aurornis 8mo ago> The magic was that Apple brought the uncompromised experience to a laptop. Apple’s power efficiency was a great bump forward, but the performance claims were a little exaggerated. I love my Apple Silicon devices but I still switch over to a desktop for GPU work because it’s so much faster, for example. Apple had that famously misleading chart where they showed their M1 GPU keeping pace with a flagship nVidia card that misled everyone at launch. In practice they’re not even close to flagship desktop accelerators, unfortunately. They have excellent idle power consumption though. Great for a laptop.
- Aurornis 8mo agoI also went from an Intel MacBook Pro to an M1 and appreciated it, but that leap was exaggerated by how bad the last few generations of Intel MacBook Pros were. The Apple Silicon chassis was allowed to finally house an appropriate cooling solution, too. They are much quieter than the same Intel laptops when dissipating the same power levels.
- nunez 8mo agoAgreed. That was the next big boost! I installed my first SSD in this HP workstation-grade laptop that we got "for free" from college. It was like getting a brand new computer! In fact, I ended up giving that computer to my sister who ran it into the ground. I didn't feel any huge speed boosts like that until the M1 MacBook in 2020.
- pdpi 8mo agoI think the single biggest jump I ever experienced was my first dedicated GPU — a GeForce 2 MX if I'm not mistaken.
- kwanbix 8mo agoMy first pentium was clocked at 60Mhz.
- iwontberude 8mo agoI remember our school getting new computers to replace the 233Mhz G3 iMac computer lab during the Megahertz Wars and the vice principal announcing the purchase of new "screaming fast" 600 Mhz Dell Optiplex GX100. The nice thing is that the G3 iMacs then got pushed out to the classrooms, but it was sad to see Apple lose the spot in the lab. I miss the wonder of playing Pangea Software games for the first time like Bugdom and Nanosaur.
- OldSchool 8mo agoWhen Alder Lake finally made a sizable jump, I looked at decades of old tests I'd done along the way with CPUs and tried to bridge them together reasonably. Between IPC (~50 to 100-fold improvement) and clock speed increases (1000-fold alone), I estimated that single-thread performance has increased on the order of 50,000x - 100,000x since the 4.77 MHz 8088. In human terms this is like one minute compared to one month!
- s0rce 8mo agoThen Windows 11 came along to slow everything down and we are back to the stoneage.
- ponector 8mo agoGot recently a new surface laptop at work - windows 11 gives me the same feeling I had from Vista. Hilarious how modern computers are more powerful than ever, but windows 11 now feels worse than windows 7 ten years ago.
- s0rce 8mo agoI set up an old instrument in the lab and the computer is running Windows 7 and it feels better than the newer machines running 11.