18 ms·

My classmate kept his Amiga 1200 a bit longer! ...eventually he got a PC with Pentium 60 MHz.

• einr 5mo ago
  Yeah, there were holdouts of course but the DX/2 really seems like the breaking point. (Also, a Pentium 60 is barely faster than a DX/2 66 at many tasks — it is a Bad Processor — but that’s another conversation ;)
  • Synaesthesia 5mo ago
    Pentium is a bad processor? It's way faster than 486, especially on FP it's not even close.
    • Sheeplator 5mo ago
      The Pentium was great, but the 60 and 66MHz versions were not liked, they ran way too hot.
      • phicoh 5mo ago
        I think from the price people also expect a similar performance boost as going from 386 to 486. What made Pentium also confusing is that during this time Intel introduced PCI. From a 486 with VLB to a Pentium with PCI everything became a lot nicer.
      • qubex 5mo ago
        They ran on 5V supplies and it was only later that the whole architecture was changed to 3.3 V with the 90 and 100 MHz Pentiums (which were then discovered to have the infamous FOOF division bug).
    • einr 5mo ago
      The original Pentiums (socket 4, 60 or 66 MHz) had the infamous floating point division bug, had underwhelming perf for anything not FP bound (most things), ran hot, and were too expensive for what you got. A DX/4 100 was nearly always a more rational choice. Second gen Pentiums, starting with the 75 MHz, were great.
      • TheAmazingRace 5mo ago
        It didn't help that the earliest P5 Pentiums ran on a 5V rail. Newer revisions starting with the P54 core used 3.3V and helped with keeping the chips cool.
      • whaleofatw2022 5mo ago
        Idk if the 75 was really that great tho, mostly in that it had a 50Mhz FSB rather than 60 or 66Mhz like most other parts. Another factor for the later P1s being better IIRC was improved chipsets.
        • einr 5mo ago
          To be more exact, I think the first great Pentium was the 133, but the 75 is the first that was a real, proper jump in performance from a fast 486 and represented decent price/performance.
        • prmoustache 5mo ago
          We had a 90 overclocked to 100Mhz that served as the family computer, I inherited from it when the family computer was upgraded to a K6 II and it chugged along as my personal computer until ~2001 thanks to Linux whike the Ghz barrier had been broken for a while already in the Intel world. I think my next computer came with an AMD Duron 900Mhz, an entry level at the time but the jump from the pentium 100Mhz was such a huge gap it still felt like a formula 1.
      • mikestorrent 5mo ago
        I had a P60 that had the F0 0F bug; Windows would crash for weird reasons on it, but Linux ran like a champ because it actually had a workaround. Luckily my chip was already recalled for the FDIV bug so it wasn't a total boat anchor. Loved that machine. I had BeOS, QNX, and one time I made Linux look like Solaris with all the Open Look stuff - really enjoyed that aesthetic. Now we have these amazing displays and graphics cards and there's literally no way to make my Mac have different window titlebars or anything. So boring
        • 5mo ago
  • Sharlin 5mo ago
    Many tasks perhaps, but running Quake was not one of them.
    • einr 5mo ago
      Yeah, it does alright and is a significant difference to a DX/2, but Quake came out in ’96 and the P60 came out as a super expensive workstation class CPU in ’93. If you were a gamer in ’96 it is unlikely you were rocking a P60 because it was not ever good value for money.
  • ngcazz 5mo ago
    You could play 320x200 Quake acceptably on a P60. On a DX4 too, though barely - my family had both in the mid 90s. I'd be surprised if Quake is playable on a DX2.