5 ms·
What came after the 486?
- stevefan1999 7mo agoAh the pentium, aka 5-ium due to the penta- prefix. It is actually a nod from 4 to 5, but Intel wanted some cool name, and they decided penta + premium would sound cool, hence pentium. But still, internally we call it i586, because that's the way it is. so is Pentium MMX which I reckon is called i686.
- gabrielsroka 7mo agoTrademarks > The name invoked the number five, but was completely trademarkable, unlike the number 586.
- jhbadger 7mo agoI remember when IBM was upset that various companies were calling their 80286 computers "<Brandname> AT" like the IBM AT ("advanced technology"). But you can't trademark a preposition!
- kube-system 7mo agoIt's not that simple -- you can definitely trademark a preposition. Go search USPTO, it's not hard to find some: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/90234636 https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/90234636
- dspillett 7mo agoYes, and Intel had actually lost a legal attempt to stop people using the numbers (I can't remember if this was earlier in the 486 era or if it was something they tried first with 586). But marketing was a large part of the reason that they started caring so much at that particular time. The Pentium line was the first time Intel had marketed directly to the end users¹² in part as a response to alt-486 manufacturers (AMD, Cyryx) doing the same with their products⁴ like clock-doubled units compatible with standard 486/487 targetted sockets (which were cheaper and, depending on workload, faster than the Intel upgrade options). -------- [1] this was the era that “Intel Inside (di dum di dum)” initially came from [2] that was also why the FDIV bug was such a big thing despite processor bugs³ being, within the industry, an accepted part of the complex design and manufacturing process [3] for a few earlier examples: a 486 FPU bug that resulted in what should have been errors (such as overflow) being silently ignored, another (more serious) one in trig functions that resulted in a partial recall and the rest of that line being marked down as 486SX units (with a pin removed to effectively disable the FPU), similarly an entire stepping of 386 chips ended up sold as “for 16 bit code only”, going further back into the 8-bit days some versions of the 6502 had a bug or two in handling things (jump instructions, loading via relative references) that straddled page boundaries (which were mitigated in code by being careful with code/data alignment, no recalls, just errata published)
- hulitu 7mo ago> but Intel wanted some cool name, and they decided penta + premium would sound cool, hence pentium some say that they tried to add 486 with 100 and the result had some numbers after the comma, that's why they named it pentium (yes, i know about the FDIV bug)
- laurencerowe 7mo agoi686 was the microarchitecture introduced with the Pentium Pro and then Pentium II.
- chasil 7mo agoIf I am correct, the Pentium Pro was the first "out of order" design. It specialized in 32-bit code, and did not handle 16-bit code very well. The original Pentium I believe introduced a second pipeline that required a compiler to optimize for it to achieve maximum performance. AMD actually made successful CPUs based on Berkeley RISC, similar to SPARC (they used register windows). The AMD K5 had this RISC CPU at its core. AMD bought NexGen and improved their RISC design for the K6 then Athlon.
- squater 7mo agoSmall correction, Pentium Pro was the first OoO microprocessor from Intel. Others like IBM POWER1 came earlier
- chasil 7mo agoVery true, Bob Colwell was hired with past experience in this, I think from "Cyndrome" (edit: Multiflow). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38459128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38459128
- p_l 7mo agoIt was intel's (at least) second OoO processor, after i960 - from which it pulled important team members.
- zem 7mo agoI always figured the "-ium" part was in imitation of element naming, to make it sound scientific
- rob74 7mo agoPor qué no los dos? If "-ium" makes nerds think of an element name, and others of a premium product, all the better. I'd bet both of these interpretations were listed in the original internal marketing presentation of the name...
- stevefan1999 7mo agoSelf-correction: Pentium MMX is still i586, it is Pentium Pro that is i686, the confusion is real.
- thisisidiotic 7mo agoYea I'll take "Things that make me feel old for $1000 Alex."
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- AdamN 7mo agoI remember not believing my friend when he said that the OS and the games were inside the computer and didn't need to be loaded up via a floppy disk. That was my first time seeing a hard drive.
- xoxxala 7mo agoMy very first hard drive was for an Apple //gs. It was the size of a shoebox and was a whopping 5 megabytes. I was an Egghead employee at the time and after my employee discount, it was something like $600-$700.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoFirst hard drive I bought for a PC was 20MB. I remember thinking how I would never fill it.
- specproc 7mo agoI remember writing a cyberpunk story as a kid, in which everyone was rocking badass 786s.
- pavlov 7mo agoThe Pentium III does sound like a good chip choice for a retro cyberpunk story. Like they said in “The Matrix”, 1999 was the peak of human civilization. (586 became Pentium, so 686 would be the Pentium Pro/II microarchitecture.)
- thatjoeoverthr 7mo agoIIRC III was also 6th gen microarchitecture. Pentium IV was the 7th.
- electrosphere 7mo agoI remember 1999/2000-ish I had both a Pentium III/Intel motherboard and Athlon PC. The Pentium III system was rock solid, and performed fantasic. Even the CPU and motherboard looked amazing. The Athlon was solid but less reliable, various reboots and glitches. I kind have always had a preference for Intel since then.
- Delk 7mo agoA lot of that probably came down to the motherboard chipset. IIRC Intel made their own chipsets for the Pentium III and they were good and reliable. Athlons were coupled with chipsets from VIA and whatnot. Some of those chipsets were fine and others were less reliable or compatible. The quality of the drivers for each chipset may also have mattered.
- bitwize 7mo agoP6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium. RISC architecture is gonna change everything.
- mtzaldo 7mo agoYou can watch Serial Experiments Lain. It is an anime from 1998.
- Anonasty 7mo agoThe years when Pentium came was a bit of an shitshow. As the article said, there were 7 companies producing 486 processors but after that the market was mostly Intel, AMD and little Cyrix. Then came socket-A vs. slot-A etc. Now looking back it seems like there was lot of changes in short period of time.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rasz 7mo agoThings started progressing so fast in mid nineties that brand new top of the line computer was being matched in performance by low end offerings 2 years later. Lasted up to late 2000. December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching 1998 $621-824 Pentium 2s. January 2002 $120 Duron 1300/Celeron 1300 beating 2000 $1000 Athlon 1000/Pentium 3 1000-1133 June 2007 $40 Celeron 420 overclockable out of the box from stock 1.6 to 3.2GHz beat best $1000 CPUs of year 2005 (FX-57, P4 EE). Same goes for Graphic chips starting around 1998/9.
- jl6 7mo agoIt's so much fun living through the steep bit of an S curve that we imagine it might last forever...
- canpan 7mo agoI get the feeling. The 90s in particular, maybe even until crysis went super fast. Then tech felt incredibly stagnant for over a decade. But the time since 2020 feels much faster again. It's scary! But it's exciting.
- Ekaros 7mo agoOn other hand not being hopelessly outdated in a relatively short time does have perks. It is cheaper to not have to update constantly and still getting decent performance.
- 7mo ago
- rob74 7mo agoAnother interesting episode "after the 486" was the switch from 32 bit to 64 bit, where Intel wanted to bury the ghost of the 8086 once and for all and switched to a completely new architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64), while AMD opted to extend the x86 architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64). This was probably the first time that customers voted with their feet against Intel in a major way. The Itanium CPUs with the new architecture were quickly rechristened "Itanic" and Intel grudgingly had to switch to AMDs instruction set - that's the reason why the current instruction set still used by all "x86" CPUs is often referred to as AMD-64.
- phire 7mo agoWhat I find interesting is that Intel engineers actually designed their own 64-bit extension, somewhere along the same lines as AMD64. Intel's marketing department threw a fit, they didn't want the Pentium 4 competing with their flagship Itanium. Bob Colwell was directly ordered to remove the 64-bit functionality. Which he kind of did, kind of didn't. The functionally was still there, but fused off when Netburst shipped. If it wasn't for AMD beating them to market with AMD64, Intel would have probably eventually allowed their engineers to enable the 64-bit extension. And when it did come time to add AMD64 support to the Pentium 4 (later Prescott and Cedar Mill models) the existing 64-bit support probably made for a good starting point. Bob Colwell talks about this (and some of the x86 team vs Itanium team drama) in his quora answer and followup comments: https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-delivering-the-first-x86-64-instruction-set-Was-Intel-too-distracted-by-the-Itanium-project-If-so-why-Shouldn-t-Intel-with-its-vast-resources-have-been-able-to-develop-both https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-deli...
- p_l 7mo agoAround the time of K8 being released, I remember reading official intel roadmaps announced to normal people, and they essentially planned that for at least few more years if not more they will segment into increasingly consumer-only 32bit and IA-64 on the higher end
- sehugg 7mo agoI had one of those 133 MHz 486 chips, think it was AMD. Nice DOS gaming machine.
- guenthert 7mo agoWell pentiums of course! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_About_the_Pentiums https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_About_the_Pentiums
- ricardo81 7mo agoAh. There's a whole generation of people who never enjoyed the Intel inside / Pentium jingle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVafplZCsjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVafplZCsjU
- mememememememo 7mo ago"enjoyed" It was annoying as it seemed every computer ad needed to play it, not just intel ads.
- sgerenser 7mo agoThey didn’t need to, it by playing it and slapping Intel Insude stickers on the computer, they got a substantial marketing fee/kickback per unit sold.
- patwolf 7mo agoPentium marketing was next level. You could buy plushies of Intel workers in bunny suits. The first IMAX movie I went to was called "The Journey Inside", and it was basically a big ad for the Pentium. I always wondered if some of that was to offset the negative publicity from the FDIV bug in the early Pentiums.
- giantrobot 7mo agoI have a bunny suit plushie on my shelf to this day. The other Pentium marketing blitz I remember was in the 1998 Lost in Space which had a TV ad for a Pentium XXI or something. Also notable was the Silicon Graphics branding in that movie. Which I have always found amusing since SGI didn't have any consumer products and even for businesses the prices were "Call Us" which has always meant eye watering expensive.
- irusensei 7mo agoFun fact: Bonnel Atoms (D510 etc) were not affected by the meltdown vulnerability that plagued every Pentium processor since the 1995 Pentiums. These Atoms use purely in-order execution engines which kinda makes them supercharged 486s.
- bentt 7mo agoCool writeup. I never knew they moved to the name Pentium over 586 simply for trademark ability.
- montroser 7mo agoI remember those Cyrix chips well. We had a little shop where we would assemble boxes to spec. And hey, a 486 is a 486, we reasoned. They were cheap, ran cool, and just about as fast as the others.
- daniel_iversen 7mo agoMe too, and I recall the Cyrix "Pentium-like" chips were cheaper and faster than Intel's actual Pentium chips! [1] [1] https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/49259.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/49259.html
- sombragris 7mo agoI remember fondly the AMD K6/2 architecture. It was the CPU of a ultra-budget priced Compaq Presario laptop that got me through graduate school back in the day. Some years later, back in my home country (Paraguay) I met a lady who had a side business being a VAR builder of desktop PCs. In my country, due to a lot of constraints, there was (and is) quite a money crunch and people tried to cheap out the most when purchasing computers. This gave rise to a lot of unscrupulous VAR resellers who built ultra-low quality, underpowered PCs with almost unusable specs at an attractive price while making a pretty profit. You could still get much better deals in both price and specs, but you had to have an idea about where to look. Well, back to this lady. She said that during the early 2000s she was on the same line of business, selling beige box desktop PCs at the lowest possible prices. But she said that she loved the AMD K6 and K6/2 architectures because they provided considerable bang for the buck. The cost was affordable, and yet performance was good. Add some reasonable amounts of RAM and storage and you could have a well-performing PC at a good price. The downside, as she said, was that the processors tended to generate lots of heat and thus the fans had to be good. This was especially important in a very hot country like Paraguay. But the bottom line was that AMD K6 line enabled her to offer customers a good deal. This made me appreciate what AMD did with K6. They really helped to bring good computers to the masses.
- homebrewer 7mo agoThose sellers never disappeared; although I'm from not from Paraguay, the situation is familiar. These days they're selling desktops built on 10+ year old Xeons which you can buy for dirt cheap on AliExpress, installed on frankenstein motherboards from noname Chinese manufacturers which are desktop-oriented, but take server processors. The graphics card is something old like RX480, and comes from being run into the ground by years of crypto"currency" mining, then resoldered on a new board, also often developed by Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of. Graphics cards especially are very unreliable and frequently die within a few months of purchase. But when you can buy a whole PC for the price of one modern videocard, many don't have a choice. https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-intel-xeon-processors.html https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-intel-xeon-processors.htm... https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-motherboards-xeon.html https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-motherboards-xeon.html https://aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-amd-radeon-rx-580.html https://aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-amd-radeon-rx-580.html
- rickcarlino 7mo agoI am almost 40 and only now realizing “pent”ium came after “4”86.
- bdcravens 7mo agoI'm also 50 and just realized it.
- Zardoz84 7mo agoThey add 100 to the 486, but they got 585.99999999.... so they called it Pentium xD
- nobleach 7mo agoI was a poor kid building computers in the mid to late 90's. I tried everything I could NOT to use a true Pentium. My first build (coming from an upgraded Compaq 386DX) was an AMD 486 "DX4". I had a Diamond Stealth PCI VGA card and 16mb of DRAM. After that I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. I had to run some software pentium emulation to get Cubase to run. I went 300Mhz Celeron after that. That was my first time trying the new SDRAM! After that I FINALLY got a legit Pentium III 400Mhz! I could go on and on as this is a lovely walk down memory lane and there's been some fun dips back into AMD Athlon/Ryzen/etc.
- dspillett 7mo ago> I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. Those chips were excellent value for mostly integer work, but had incredibly poor floating-point performance which was a problem for gamers as the 3D era was really getting going around that time. I had one, it did me good service for a few years.
- nobleach 7mo agoYeah, I was all about recording music/running the first iteration of software synths. I was a Graphic Design major at that time so Photoshop/Illustrator/QuarkXpress were my jam. Those suprisingly didn't run that bad - in real Graphic Design, no one used Eyecandy (the reason everything on the web in 1998 had drop shadows, outter glows, lens flares) so rendering "3D" rarely came into play.
- oleggromov 7mo agoNot only performance, I strongly suspect there were issues with implementation too as the apps would just freeze/die frequently.
- dspillett 7mo agoThey were practically overclocked coming out of the factory, so if you had any issue at all with cooling, or attempted to clock them up even higher, they would be unstable.
- chinathrow 7mo agoBooting up a Pentium after having used a 486 for years was like driving on the high way compared to riding a toddler bike on a foot trail.
- wodenokoto 7mo agoSomething something Intel tried to add 100 to 486, got 585.97858475858473737272747837 and just called it pentium
- dice 7mo ago0xf00fc7c8
- moefh 7mo agoShouldn't that be 0xc8c70ff0, since we're talking about a little-endian CPU? (according to this[1] the bytes in memory are F0 0F C7 C8). On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have recognized the F00F bug mention if you had actually written 0xc8c70ff0. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug
- dice 7mo agoIt was a popular meme in computer security focused groups for a while after it was discovered since it was an unprivileged DoS. I only remember seeing it talked about with the f00f representation: some people even called it "getting f00f'd" if you managed to trick someone into executing the instructions.
- icedchai 7mo agoThis makes me feel old. I remember getting a 486 (DX4/100) in mid-1994, the Pentium was still too expensive!
- bluedino 7mo agoA friend of mine bought a Pentium 60MHz from a local computer store, they originally wanted $10,000 for it, but he got it for $4,000. It wasn't much more than a year later that I was able to get a Pentium 100MHz for $2000. It's amazing how fast things progressed back then.
- theodorethomas 7mo agoI remember a 120MHz Pentium Linux box arriving at a cottage in Crete, where, with the aid of a 56k USRobotics modem, we (my wife and I) worked remotely in 1995-6. She had a Mac SE/30 for her tourist guidebook work. She later upgraded to a 6100 PowerMac "pizza-box", various iMacs, G3/G4/G5, whereas I saved a quad-200MHz PentiumPro monster (Compaq Professional Workstation 8000, tricked up to 3GB RAM) from the skip. I regret taking that to the recycling centre many years later.
- bluedino 7mo ago> The original Pentium-branded CPU topped out at 200 MHz in the end, and the Pentium MMX-branded CPU reached 233 MHz. There was a mobile 266MHz Pentium MMX, Tillamook And it appears there was a 300MHz version according to Wikipedia.
- bluedino 7mo agoThe worst part about the 486 name was all the varieties, an uninformed consumer could get a real lemon. The author links to an example: https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-486slc2-cpu-when-a-clone-isnt-a-clone/ https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-486slc2-cpu-when-a-clone-isnt-a... You then had the 486 DLCs which were even worse. you'd get companies that sold 386 and even 286 systems with '486' chips, constrained by slow, 16-bit buses, etc.
- badc0ffee 7mo agoThe 486DLC was fully 32 bit. The 286/386SX-like model with a 16 bit bus was the 486SLC. But, even a 486SLC wasn't all that bad at the time. It was still much faster than a 386DX for many things (DOOM, for example). These AT-like machines limited users to 16-bit ISA cards for expansion, and a 24-bit address bus (16 MB RAM). But how many consumer PCs used more than that, back when your 32-bit bus options were VLB (video only), MCA (IBM only), or EISA (expensive servers/workstations only).
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoThat's quite a lot of words to say "Pentium" Sure AMD and a few others had back-seat answers, but Intel was literally driving the bus.
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoIntel was figuratively, not literally, driving the bus.
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoPCI wasn't IBM. Literally driving the bus, Intel was, did, done. https://timeline.intel.com/1993/peripheral-component-interconnect-bus https://timeline.intel.com/1993/peripheral-component-interco...
- tycoon666 7mo agoThe AMD 5x86 was the first Machine i ran Linux on
- xbar 7mo agoNice nostalgic piece. I have a lot of fond "favorite chip" memories from that era. Not to be too pedantic, I would contend that at the time, it was pretty clear to enthusiast what the differences were. Everyone in the industry was paying attention to 486s and the cost of a genuine intel chip. The FDIV bug was on every Evening News for weeks. AMD and Cyrix vs intel debates were common. I agree that it is not obvious now that Pentium came after 486, but at the time, it was clear.
- jimt1234 7mo agoHere's the answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos
- easygenes 7mo agoI never felt during this era that the information about these chips was hard to come by as the author claims. Retrospectively I appreciate that’s because I grew up living by a large, well funded library in a tech centric town, so they always had all the latest tech publications.
- geocrasher 7mo agoMy first PC was a 286/12 with an AMD chip in it. I well remember the 486SX/2-66's and how terrible they were. I liked to say that Compaq put the "sorry" in Presario. In the late 90's, between around 96 and 98, I made good money building AMD 486 DX/4 133's. Those things were blindingly fast for the price. As I recall there was even a 150MHz variant. Still, my favorite CPU of all time remains the AMD K6/2-450. It wasn't until the Phenom II BE950, a dual core that I unlocked to quad core , that I felt I had a CPU that matched the K6/2-450 in value. Since then I've had a couple of Ryzen's for my daily driver/work machine, and couldn't be happier. AMD has done a fantastic job keeping price and performance in tune. But, it goes even further if you shop smartly. Overall, this was an excellent read, and brought back a lot of memories. The 6x86 for example- too much promise for what they actually delivered. And, thanks to this article I now know why so many cheap motherboards had their CPU's soldered. It wasn't a technology decision, but a legal one. I had no idea of that at the time.
- nazgulsenpai 7mo agoI bought an AMD Sempron "single core" CPU for a pittance (can't remember now how much it was, but it was the cheapest new CPU available) and as able to unlock the second core in the BIOS immediately with no issues, saving a ton of money. Those were the days.
- absolute8606 7mo agoOh man, my first custom build had a Phenom II 955 BE. Overclocked beautifully, I loved that system. Got it in a barebones kit from good old TigerDirect, RIP
- aaroninsf 7mo agoFellow AMD fan here—it wasn't that long ago that I finally relinquished the old ABIT motherboard that overclocked my AMD badboy to eke out extra cycles for my DAW. Also, for Half Life.
- tracker1 7mo agoI had an AMD 5x86 @133 that lasted me several years... I had the secondary cache module and 64mb of ram, which was a lot for the time. It wasn't great for gaming, but general productivity software and just simple web browsing it was kind of a beast from the ram/cache performance. The next computer I really remember was an OC'd AMD Duron at 1ghz.
- kej 7mo agoI really like that VIA produced a CPU with integrated graphics, prominently labeled "VIA GRA", the same year that the FDA approved sildenafil.
- textwizhub 7mo agoI still keep and metal case of my first 486 with 66Mhz CPU with Windows 3.11 installed and remember that Pentium 100Mhz was what people were buying next.
- EvanAnderson 7mo agoSecond only to getting an SSD in my 2006-vintage laptop the AMD 5x86 was the best upgrade I ever put in a computer, dollars for performance. It made my 486SX-25 run like a 75Mhz+ Pentium. Linux kernel builds flew after that. I also fondly remember seeing little bits of "Second Reality" run better or show me things I'd never seen before (more of the sword extending further from the pool, as an example).
- karim79 7mo agoOof I'm old enough to remember the Cyrix chips. They were cheaper than the other players, which lured in a lot of people who then regretted it once they realised that they were constantly crashing hot-garbage. Good times.
- MattGrommes 7mo agoI'll always have a fond spot in my heart for my cheap Cyrix CPU. Once I was near finishing an important project in the middle of the night and my CPU fan died. The cyrix chip would overheat in no time and shut down so I ended up filling a coffee mug with ice and jamming it up against the chip, giving me more precious minutes before it got hot enough to shut down again. I would swap out the ice in the mug and give it another go. I got that project done. :)
- oleggromov 7mo agoYou got the water cooling before it was cool, minus the thermal paste.
- mrlonglong 7mo agoI loved the 486DX/4 at 120MHz. That thing was fast.
- oleggromov 7mo agoI remember I had a Cyrix 6x86 in one of my first computers that ran windows 95. It was terrible. When I tried to play games or run some apps with non-trivial performance requirements and, I suppose, that used floating point operations extensively, perhaps MMX or some other proprietary extensions, apps would just die. Often with the entire operating system.
- kevinbaiv 7mo ago[flagged]
- NGRhodes 7mo agoI remember the torment of trying to choose between a P90 or a Cyrix133 and compatible motherboards at similar price combinations.