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I 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.
by sombragris 7mo ago
I 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
- zozbot234 7mo agoThe notion that GPU chips can be "run into the ground" by years of crypto mining or AI workloads has been debunked pretty thoroughly by now. The hardware is quite resilient, it doesn't really fail at a higher rate.
- nazgulsenpai 7mo agoI bought a XFX RX 580 that was used for cryptomining from eBay, used it for 3 years then handed it down to my son who used it for 2 more. It still worked when he removed it. Can confirm.
- gsck 7mo agoI used an AMD Radeon 7770 for years, then I upgraded to a GTX 1060, the 7770 became my younger sister's GPU for her PC. It has only recently gave out, after some 14 years of service. Likewise for the 1060, its still going strong. I upgraded to a 3060 round about the time my younger brother decided he wanted a PC so he is now using it without any issues. About 10 years use out of it, plenty more to go. GPUs are pretty damn resilient if you aren't pissing around with them.
- lossyalgo 7mo agoAlso any miner worth their salt knows to undervolt to save power (=money), run cooler, last longer, and run at very close to full speed or even in some cases 100% full-speed, depending on silicon "lottery".
- mfro 7mo agoI think the problem is the distinction here between chips and boards. The entire GPU assembly can absolutely be worn down from continuous use, thermal pads, paste, VRMs, fans do degrade. The chip itself may be fine but it's very rare to find anyone willing to transplant a GPU from one board to another.
- sombragris 7mo agoWell, a lot of people here would have loved to have 10-year old Xeons in their motherboards; while power hungry, I guess they would make good CPUs since they have good cache sizes. But no, there's no Xeons in our offers here. What people get here now are Intel Pentium and Celeron-branded CPUs, or N-class CPUs, with the onboard GPU only, 4GB RAM and 1 TB HDD running unlicensed Windows with understandable results. But when you are a digitally illiterate parent seeking to purchase a first PC for your children of school age, this looks attractive enough at a good price point.
- tirant 7mo agoI indeed remember too the family of K6 chips and their Super Socket 7 motherboards. They were cheap and affordable, and allowed cpu upgrades to classical Socket 7 motherboards. The peak of the Super Socket 7 performance CPUs was reached when AMD released the + versions of those chips, the K6-2+ and K6-3+. Those were initially designed for laptops with lower powerconsumption and some enhanced instruction set. But they quickly became common in typical overclockers setup. I got myself a K6-3+ that I was able to overclock to around 600MHz, probably on an ASUS motherboard. Back then AMD was fighting so much to get marketshare that you could order for free all types of merchandising from AMD like posters, stickers and CPU badges, and they would even ship it for free from US to Europe. I remember always bringing some to hacker meetings.
- accrual 7mo agoI happen to have one of those 600MHz chips on my bench currently! It's a K6-2+ that has had the remaining 128KB cache unlocked, making it a K6-3+. It is indeed a speedy chip, performing somewhere above a Pentium II-450 according to Speedsys. Do you recall how long you used the platform or your next upgrade choice? :)
- snarfy 7mo agoI recall these being referred to as KMD
- Tuna-Fish 7mo agoK6 was great at everything other than FP. Unfortunately for AMD, a year before its launch ID released Quake, for which the primary metric of performance was basically "how fast are you at FP". And Quake very rapidly became the common benchmark against which CPU performance was measured.