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0 pointscogman107mo ago0 comments

Man that was a beast of a CPU back in the day.

The Conroe Intel era was amazing for the time.

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That was such a fun time to be into hardware. For years Intel had the money and relationships to keep the Pentium 4 everywhere even though AMD had the better product. The P4 might edge ahead in video rendering but the Athlon would win overall and use less power.

Then Conroe launched and the balance shifted. Even the cheapest Core2Duo chips were competitive against the best P4s and the high-end C2Ds rivaled or beat AMD. https://web.archive.org/web/20100909205130/http://www.anandt...

AND those chips overclocked to the moon. I got my E6420 to 3.2ghz (from 2.133ghz) just by upping the multiplier. A quick search makes me think my chip wasn't even that great.

cogman10OP7mo ago

Absolutely. Intel was also keeping up the tick-tock processing. I could be misremembering, but it seemed like every tock intel was getting something like 20% improvements over the last tock. It really wasn't until ~Haswell that that slowed down and continued to slow down to basically nothing. I think Kaby Lake IIRC was the last major performance jump from intel. Everything else has just been incremental changes.

bayindirh6mo ago

One of the reasons that Intel only shipped 5% incremental updates was AMD was basically non-existent due to both Intel pressuring them and AMD has done a massive mistake with bulldozer/piledriver architecture.

They vastly underestimated how much a single FPU would be bottleneck on a multicore/SMP processor.

Then AMD took things personal and architected Zen/EPYC. The rest is history.

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bayindirh7mo ago

Buying parts for that particular desktop was quite fun:

    - Me: Can I get a Q6600?
    - Seller: But, that's... Quad core?
    - Me: Yes, I'll have it.
    - Seller: OK. RAM?
    - Me: I'll get OCZ Flex-XLC Hybrids. 1GB.
    - Seller: *Gives one*
    - Me: I'll get four.
    - Seller: ?
    - Me: Yes, four please.

Motherboard was an MSI P35 Platinum. Fun times.

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