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.
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.htm...
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.
(586 became Pentium, so 686 would be the Pentium Pro/II microarchitecture.)
1974: Intel 8080
1978: Intel 8086
1982: Intel 80286
1985: Intel 80386
1990: Intel 8010386
1995: Intel 801040386
2005: Intel 80107045386
2025: Intel 8.010207659386e12I well remember the 486SX/2-66's and how terrible they were. I liked to say that Compaq put the "sorry" in Presario.
In the late 90's, between around 96 and 98, I made good money building AMD 486 DX/4 133's. Those things were blindingly fast for the price. As I recall there was even a 150MHz variant.
Still, my favorite CPU of all time remains the AMD K6/2-450. It wasn't until the Phenom II BE950, a dual core that I unlocked to quad core , that I felt I had a CPU that matched the K6/2-450 in value. Since then I've had a couple of Ryzen's for my daily driver/work machine, and couldn't be happier. AMD has done a fantastic job keeping price and performance in tune. But, it goes even further if you shop smartly.
Overall, this was an excellent read, and brought back a lot of memories. The 6x86 for example- too much promise for what they actually delivered. And, thanks to this article I now know why so many cheap motherboards had their CPU's soldered. It wasn't a technology decision, but a legal one. I had no idea of that at the time.
Also, for Half Life.
But still, internally we call it i586, because that's the way it is. so is Pentium MMX which I reckon is called i686.
> The name invoked the number five, but was completely trademarkable, unlike the number 586.
some say that they tried to add 486 with 100 and the result had some numbers after the comma, that's why they named it pentium (yes, i know about the FDIV bug)
Intel's marketing department threw a fit, they didn't want the Pentium 4 competing with their flagship Itanium. Bob Colwell was directly ordered to remove the 64-bit functionality.
Which he kind of did, kind of didn't. The functionally was still there, but fused off when Netburst shipped.
If it wasn't for AMD beating them to market with AMD64, Intel would have probably eventually allowed their engineers to enable the 64-bit extension. And when it did come time to add AMD64 support to the Pentium 4 (later Prescott and Cedar Mill models) the existing 64-bit support probably made for a good starting point.
Bob Colwell talks about this (and some of the x86 team vs Itanium team drama) in his quora answer and followup comments: https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-deli...
I would tend to believe that the Itanium is an HP product, given that they've always seems more invested in the platform than Intel.
Not to be too pedantic, I would contend that at the time, it was pretty clear to enthusiast what the differences were. Everyone in the industry was paying attention to 486s and the cost of a genuine intel chip. The FDIV bug was on every Evening News for weeks. AMD and Cyrix vs intel debates were common.
I agree that it is not obvious now that Pentium came after 486, but at the time, it was clear.
December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching 1998 $621-824 Pentium 2s.
January 2002 $120 Duron 1300/Celeron 1300 beating 2000 $1000 Athlon 1000/Pentium 3 1000-1133
June 2007 $40 Celeron 420 overclockable out of the box from stock 1.6 to 3.2GHz beat best $1000 CPUs of year 2005 (FX-57, P4 EE).
Same goes for Graphic chips starting around 1998/9.
I always wondered if some of that was to offset the negative publicity from the FDIV bug in the early Pentiums.
It was annoying as it seemed every computer ad needed to play it, not just intel ads.
The author links to an example:
https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-486slc2-cpu-when-a-clone-isnt-a...
You then had the 486 DLCs which were even worse. you'd get companies that sold 386 and even 286 systems with '486' chips, constrained by slow, 16-bit buses, etc.
But, even a 486SLC wasn't all that bad at the time. It was still much faster than a 386DX for many things (DOOM, for example).
These AT-like machines limited users to 16-bit ISA cards for expansion, and a 24-bit address bus (16 MB RAM). But how many consumer PCs used more than that, back when your 32-bit bus options were VLB (video only), MCA (IBM only), or EISA (expensive servers/workstations only).
Those chips were excellent value for mostly integer work, but had incredibly poor floating-point performance which was a problem for gamers as the 3D era was really getting going around that time. I had one, it did me good service for a few years.
Sure AMD and a few others had back-seat answers, but Intel was literally driving the bus.
There was a mobile 266MHz Pentium MMX, Tillamook
And it appears there was a 300MHz version according to Wikipedia.
It wasn't much more than a year later that I was able to get a Pentium 100MHz for $2000. It's amazing how fast things progressed back then.