> getting into the Mhz wars and clock multiplying the hell out of everything. DX2 then DX4 For those reading who aren't old timers, this needs to be elaborated

> getting into the Mhz wars and clock multiplying the hell out of everything. DX2 then DX4 For those reading who aren't old timers, this needs to be elaborated on. This wasn't any trick or sleight on Intel's part. The parts really did run 2x as fast or 4x as fast internally. That was a major achievement. An instruction that took 5 clocks to execute at 33 MHz took 5 clocks to execute at 50 MHz and took 5 clocks to execute at 100 MHz. This was all accomplished over a relatively brief period of time compared to today's rate of CPU speed advancements. What slowed the CPU down was the growing mismatch between the internal operation and the external memory bus which continued to run at (usually) 33 MHz. It was possible to run the external bus at 50 MHz but most designs didn't. The 8K byte on-chip cache helped mitigate the mismatch.