XoR_
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2016
- Messages
- 1,568
Pentium was much faster when it launched though and to those who got it would give huge performance increase over any 486 available at that time. Your tests show it nicely. Actual 486 DX4 variant which came year later is still usually slower. Faster 486's like 5x86 were even newer.486 chips were cheaper, more plentiful, and thanks to multipliers, all it took was a bios update in most cases and you could be running faster vs a whole new platform that would give you an incremental boost. Sure it was 'for the future', but no one really invested in it back then except people with money--specifically talking about those p5 60-66 versions.
BTW. Intel could keep 486 platform busy as state-of-art platform for much longer but it would be a bad decision for us and them because
- It would not really make anything 486 related any cheaper - its new platform which made it more affordable than it otherwise would be
- Intel was more worried about RISC threat - Pentium had to be released to fight off RISC in other markets and Intel could not afford to beat around the bushes. 586 performance with its platform improvements (64-bit 66MHz bus) was actually adequate to compete with first generation* of RISC
Best example of Intel BS is people putting Coffee Lake in to Skylake Z170 motherboards... for DDR3. Can be done and works pretty well. I regret not going this route myself as that would make it hell of a fun platform to own and use.Yes, the socket changes are definitely funny when the pins are essentially the same or just many more vcc and ground.
LGA1156 was imho better than LGA155 and it felt like downgrade and artificially making non-K CPUs not overclock.
Later LGA11xx and even LGA12000 made even less sense and I didn't see anything changing other than amount of money in my bank account because of the need to always get more and more expensive motherboards.
There is nothing from 93 which is comparable to Pentium 60.Of course a 486dx4-200 wouldn't have been 2x as fast as a 486dx2-100. Even a 486dx2-66 was only as fast as a 486dx-50. I tested these personally when we had built our 486 and also got a prebuilt that was a 486dx-50 with 12 EISA slots in a nice heavy case, but was more expensive than our build so we returned it.
I never got a chance to mess with a 486 beyond a dx2-66 and dx-50, but I remember the amd 486dx4-80 was pretty much on par with the p5-60 for all practical 'real world' purposes. Remember that the software back then was still mainly 16-bit so the pentium was a bit of a 'meh' with it's ability to do 32-bit stuff. I stand that a 486dx4-200 would have been 2x faster than the Pentium 60 in 'real world' usage of the software at that time. In fact, someone else actually lived it and someone else did a whole set of benchmarks that reflect what I remember:
https://dependency-injection.com/diamond-stealth-64-dram/?comment-21481
https://dependency-injection.com/the-perfect-pentium/
Something had to use and popularize fancy PCI buses though. Breaking with workarounds like VLB made the whole transition much smoother.50Mhz bus worked fine when you made sure the cards you were using were also okay with it. The idea of creating additional busses required a whole re-work so backward compatibility became a problem. And back then stuff was really expensive so keeping your existing investment was important. Today, everything is just throwaway and that's stupid imo. Even with an order of magnitude faster systems from this previous era, regular every day usage isn't an order of magnitude faster, so there's been a lot of performance loss in scaling as well as bloat.
Things imho wouldn't be whole lot different. Sooner or later we would get new 64-bit bus like the first Pentium had and then DDR/QDR and breakaway from FSB completely.Yep, today's processors have changed the entire motherboard architecture even though 100Mhz is still used a refernce clock--I get that (wish cpuworld would note that better). Still it would have been neat to see where the old 486 architecture would have topped out even with the limitations. Because while all the improvements sound impressive on paper, add in the extra complexity of modern software and its impact is seriously lessened.
Which itself makes introduction of 586 bus as early as it happened less necessary but in the end it wasn't a big deal to anyone. You could still get faster 486 CPUs for some time. Also from Intel.
Doom was 32-bit because DOS4GW was used exactly for the purpose of putting 386+ CPU in to 32-bit protected mode with flat 32-bit memory and 32-bit pointers - it is like running separate 32-bit OS on top of 16-bit DOS. Even if for memory saving purposes there were a lot of 16-bit and even 8-bit variables used pointers were still 32-bit.PPro was far ahead of its time--most of the software was still 16-bit when it was released. I was there--win 95 and 98 was out, but those were pieces of 32-bit, much like NT. The software was far behind being 32-bit because most of them still had to work on 16-bit environments as well.
For the record, Doom was NEVER 32-bit. The ID game engine used some 16-bit and 32-bit stuff, but if it was fully 32-bit you could never launch it from 8-bit DOS.
That said Doom has to deal with DOS/BIOS interrupts and move in and out of 32-bit mode to and from 16-bit mode for I/O and because of that it isn't really fully 32-bit.
It might even be that this exact characteristic which puts a lot of stress on CPU ability to make fast switches between real and protected mode limits performance of Pentium Pro in Win9x which itself still relied on DOS/BIOS interrupts and I/O. I am not really sure if this is it or something else or this + something else. I know however we talk relative performance and relatively Pentium Pro showed huge performance improvements in pure 32-bit OSes and didn't show as much improvements in typical home OS at the time Windows 9x hence the moment someone mentions Pentium Pro we also have talk about 32-bit and Windows 9x not being fully 32-bit.
Mistake cost-wise, otherwise 1MB of on-die L2 cache made Pentium Pro really stand up to RISC crowd.The Pentium Pro's microcode was optimized for 32-bit code vs 8 and 16-bit like previous processors were. The pentium 2 was simply a 'fix' for the mistake of putting the cache on the die and also correcting the microcode. A Pentium 2 had to have higher clock speeds to match a Pentium Pro in a fully 32-bit environment. It did, however, do better at 8 and 16-bit than the PPro due to the revised microcode. Again, I remember this because I lived it. What shocked me was the stupid 'cartridge' system scaled up all the way to 1Ghz before it went back to sockets again.
Microcode itself could be run-time updated on Pentium Pro by BIOS update and/or OS. Not sure if Intel ever bothered with using this feature or if it was even possible to fix issues they patched with Pentium 2 revision of the cores.
Pentium Pro was not as much slow in 16-bit as it was just not showing expected performance improvements. In either case it wasn't a deal breaker. Price of the platform and it being superseded by Slot-1 Pentium 2 was.
Not that it really mattered for home user anywaysAlpha was one of the fastest NT platforms at its release--it was faster by far than anything else that could run NT in a desktop format. But this was a niche. The other RISC platforms didn't run Windows.
Definitely you should not careOh so you agree with a point, should I be impressed or surprised...or even care? lol
I myself ate scraps found on the street until Pentium D which was my first bought new system and I got it new because I wanted dual-core badly and no one had one used to sell at that timeI stopped building anything after our Cyrix P166+ based system as it was enough. I do have an HP or two with P3 processors in them as well as an IBM or two with a P3, several P4s, and all my Pentium Pros as well as our original 486dx-33 and 486dx2-66. I even still have the first PC that introduced me to the platform--the IBM PS/2 30-286. We modded that quite heavily adding SCSI, ethernet, and a 486SLC upgrade before it stopped being used and started sitting. I forgot I have a 486sx too--that was the original celeron imo--a chip with something disabled (the fpu). It started a trend that exists to this very day. All of these later systems besides the 486dx2-66 and P166+ were from business as hotel property management systems started upgrade cycles which led to a lot of working hardware ending up in utility chases until I rescued them a decade later and put them back to work.
Anyways, price drops which now obsolete platforms experienced after introducing newer platforms meant that without much money or proper ways to get money people like me could get older but still workable hardware. 386 systems became much cheaper thanks to 486 and 486 became much cheaper thanks to Pentium which itself dropped in price significantly after everyone was amazed by Pentium 2. Therefore I do not see introduction of Pentium as bad thing. If you look at computer prices in eg. 1995 then getting Pentium 66 made absolutely no sense vs. going 486 with high multipliers - true. It didn't meant Pentium even in its lowest form didn't have its place... Quake and many other 3D games ran on it quite much better than on any 486 for example.
ps.
DOS was always 16-bit8-bit DOS
Size of the memory segments and thus mostly used pointers were 16-bit.
Of course since original PC and XT used 8088 with 8-bit data paths programmers were incentivized to do as much 8-bit optimizations as possible but this itself doesn't really make DOS 8-bit.