My pentium PRO has glue all over it :(

[drizek]

Does this thing even need a heatsink?

 

[Maximilian]

Out of curiousity, is it the 60 or 66mhz version? The PPro in its day was incredible compared to the regular procs. Dual proc setups (which meant dual socket mobos in the day) for NT were great workstations. Hard to compare the PPro in todays markets. Maybe Itaniums?

Remember the Pentium II Overdrives?

Well its got a 66mhz bus, it runs at 200mhz, SL22Z 512k cache. Ive lapped it, just waiting for acetone so i can get the rest of this glue off.

To the guy above yeah it needs a heatsink, these things have two dies so they run hot i gather.

 

[T101]

Pardon the question, what would you use a Pentium Pro for these days? I mean, other than as a collector of working old computers.

 

[Morg.]

Well I believe it's for the pleasure of smashing it to pieces with a 20lbs maul and scream something along the lines of "MWAHAHAHAAA WHERE'S YOUR LOADING DIALOGS NOW !!!!"

 

[Maximilian]

Pardon the question, what would you use a Pentium Pro for these days? I mean, other than as a collector of working old computers.

They make decent placemats.

 

[SlowSpyder]

There is a Pentium Pro sitting on a shelf behind me at work. I think I could glue a handle on to it and brush my dog with that thing, they're rather large.

 

[Martimus]

I remember that I bought a AMD K6-233 that was faster in integer calculations than the same clockspeed Pentium Pro and cost about 1/3 the price to boot. I think it had much lower Floating Point performance though.

I never understood why people hold the Pentium Pro in such a great limelight? I thought it was just barely an improvement over the Pentium, and the Cyrix and AMD chips that were released at the same time could run circles around it in certain benchmarks.

 

[Arkaign]

I remember that I bought a AMD K6-233 that was faster in integer calculations than the same clockspeed Pentium Pro and cost about 1/3 the price to boot. I think it had much lower Floating Point performance though.

I never understood why people hold the Pentium Pro in such a great limelight? I thought it was just barely an improvement over the Pentium, and the Cyrix and AMD chips that were released at the same time could run circles around it in certain benchmarks.

You sort of answered your own question, but there's another bonus here :

PPro had on-package cache, with different models having different sizes available, which were all much better than the onboard cache of the socket 7 mainboards of that era. IIRC it was also a beast at 32-bit code, though not as impressive running 16-bit stuff. Anyhow, the tech got tweaked, the Pentium II was much more related to PPro than it was to Pentium, and then of course P3 wasn't too far off of P2, and eventually this spawned the Pentium M which led to ... CONROE!!! So it was an epic chip that eventually led to another super epic release.

I also had a K6-2 233, it was very good at a lot of things, not so great in others. It was at least somewhat competitive though, a little while before that I had a couple of K5s, and they were just terrible, ditto with the Cyrix stuff. Too uneven, some apps/games would be just great, others would be bleeeeeeh. Quake1 comes to mind.

 

[Cerb]

I never understood why people hold the Pentium Pro in such a great limelight? I thought it was just barely an improvement over the Pentium, and the Cyrix and AMD chips that were released at the same time could run circles around it in certain benchmarks.

Without NT4, there wasn't much going for it. NT4, and native protected mode 32-bit applications, though, flew on those things (benchmarks did not do justice the monumental snappiness difference, back in the day), and it was about the only way normal folks, who might wear tennis shoes or the occasional python boot, could have a nice dually, which also needed NT4 to be useful, at the time (well, maybe OS/2, but practically every good app for OS/2 got recompiled or properly ported to NT4).

If you ran Win95/98, and used software that wasn't made for protected mode 32-bit (i386 generally implies this, nowadays), it was somewhat of an inferior chip.

 

[Shawn]

Could this chip run Win2k decently?

 

[Maximilian]

Well theres still glue on it but my camera is crappy enough that it dosent show, so its gone from this:

to this:

 

[Martimus]

It looks nice. I see that you have a carton of British Skimmed Milk next to it (Or is that a book?) which shows how much of a mirror shine you put on that thing.

 

[Arkaign]

Could this chip run Win2k decently?

Yes, definitely. I ran Win2K on a dual PPro 166 setup, with an amazing 256mb of EDO ram lol. It was just fine for the workload I had for it, running 4 9.1gb 68-pin scsi drives off of an adaptec UW scsi card.

 

[Morg.]

You sort of answered your own question, but there's another bonus here :

PPro had on-package cache, with different models having different sizes available, which were all much better than the onboard cache of the socket 7 mainboards of that era. IIRC it was also a beast at 32-bit code, though not as impressive running 16-bit stuff. Anyhow, the tech got tweaked, the Pentium II was much more related to PPro than it was to Pentium, and then of course P3 wasn't too far off of P2, and eventually this spawned the Pentium M which led to ... CONROE!!! So it was an epic chip that eventually led to another super epic release.

I also had a K6-2 233, it was very good at a lot of things, not so great in others. It was at least somewhat competitive though, a little while before that I had a couple of K5s, and they were just terrible, ditto with the Cyrix stuff. Too uneven, some apps/games would be just great, others would be bleeeeeeh. Quake1 comes to mind.

Errr.. the pentium pro is awesome because it led to the conroe ?
You could also say it's a piece of garbage because it led to the P3 and P4, which both were really bad in multithreading and stuff.

 

[Spikesoldier]

nice work

how much time with your hands?

 

[Maximilian]

nice work

how much time with your hands?

About 45 mins, i started with 2500grit sandpaper and finished with 2500 grit sandpaper due to a lack of any other kind of sandpaper lying around :hmm:

I was kinda surprised that the gold stuff came off and silver started to show, i thought the whole block was some sort of gold or brass or something.

 

[ViRGE]

Errr.. the pentium pro is awesome because it led to the conroe ?
You could also say it's a piece of garbage because it led to the P3 and P4, which both were really bad in multithreading and stuff.

PPro was awesome on its own. The fact that it was the direct basis of another awesome architecture a decade later makes it all the more remarkable.

Though I have no idea where the hate for the P3 comes from. It was a great chip. P4/Netburst wasn't, but Netburst was nearly a completely new architecture, not unlike PPro compared to P5.

 

[mpitts]

This Pentium Pro's heat spreader was made with real gold. They go for $25-40 a piece on eBay, just based on the gold that can be extracted from them.

It looks like you may have sanded a lot of that off.

 

[ViRGE]

This Pentium Pro's heat spreader was made with real gold. They go for $25-40 a piece on eBay, just based on the gold that can be extracted from them.

It looks like you may have sanded a lot of that off.

Wow, I always figured that was brass, or something else goldish. Not that I'd ever sell my 180MHz/256K chip, but if the end of the world comes, I now have some gold to trade.

 

[Arkaign]

PPro was awesome on its own. The fact that it was the direct basis of another awesome architecture a decade later makes it all the more remarkable.

Though I have no idea where the hate for the P3 comes from. It was a great chip. P4/Netburst wasn't, but Netburst was nearly a completely new architecture, not unlike PPro compared to P5.

Truth. I was ever more involved with all of the devolopments back then, and Pentium Pro wasn't just a Pentium with on-package cache, it was quite a revolution in architechture. Pentium II and III were direct derivitives of Pentium Pro, then Pentium IV/Netburst was a completely different and new design. The process tech caught up, and the diminishing returns with IPC and efficiency problems with netburst led to the resurgence of the design started with PPro. This led us to Pentium M, Core Duo, and of course Conroe.

Pentium 3 was not a failure at all, it was quite good. I think it gets somewhat of a bad rap because most of the time it was overpriced. Overclocked Celerons, and then K7 often made more sense. The .25mu Slot-1 P3s were virtually even with the .25mu Slot-A Athlons, then the .18mu Coppermine was neck and neck with .18mu Thunderbird, until the clock speed became too difficult for Intel to maintain, proven by the infamous 1.13ghz recall. The .13mu Tualatin was quite a performer, but by then Intel Corp was focused on trying to force Socket 423 P4s onto their customers, along with RDRAM, and that was a long and varied adventure that eventually ended with the Prescott debacle, before releasing the too little too late Presler/etc on the 90nm process. P4 Northwood, much like P3 Coppermine, was a great performer, but often more expensive than it should have been, leaving Barton XPs as a juicy alternative.

 

[Morg.]

Oh come on people, do you even remember your P3's ??

That thing had NO multithreading at all, you could not just launch 5 apps and hope everything runs at 1/5th the speed.

Compare that with an Athlon at the time and the difference is pretty clear.

Just like the Athlon XP was so much better in multithreading than the P4 and the P3.

Also, afaik, AMD dominated everything between p3 and the Core architecture, and by a wide margin (price/performance/watts).

I could say the athlon was to the p3 and p4 what the core2duo was to athlon X2 and the likes, but even that is not really a good representation as the current AMD chips are just slower, not shittier.

 

[ViRGE]

Morg, I'm not sure what Athlons you remember, but there was no significant difference in multithreading between the P3 and Athlon (1). The only real revolution in multithreading performance came with the rise of multi-core CPUs; with a single core all CPUs are at the mercy of the OS thread scheduler. A context switch has never ceased to be expensive.

 

[T101]

Awesome work, that cpu now looks really nice

 

[Maximilian]

Oh come on people, do you even remember your P3's ??

That thing had NO multithreading at all, you could not just launch 5 apps and hope everything runs at 1/5th the speed.

Compare that with an Athlon at the time and the difference is pretty clear.

Just like the Athlon XP was so much better in multithreading than the P4 and the P3.

Also, afaik, AMD dominated everything between p3 and the Core architecture, and by a wide margin (price/performance/watts).

I could say the athlon was to the p3 and p4 what the core2duo was to athlon X2 and the likes, but even that is not really a good representation as the current AMD chips are just slower, not shittier.

What are you babbling about? Multithreading in the proper sense was irrelevant until the pentium D and athlon X2 showed up and even then it took a lot of time for software to even take advantage of it.

Multitasking seems a lot more like what you are talking about, opening 5 apps at once there would be no differences between the P3 or athlons at similar speeds. If you actually mean multithreading then intel would have had AMD beat with its hyperthreaded P4 which at the time was worthless because most things could only use 1 thread. AMD did not start to completely dominate intel until the athlon 64 came out.

 

[nenforcer]

lol Exactly! And us OG's even have the DX math coprocessors for our 386/SX 25 mhz procs. NEVER mess with a dude that has a math coprocessor or overdrive chip on the necklace. :ninja:

2 X Bling