My pentium PRO has glue all over it :(

[Arkaign]

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.

?? This misremembered history begs some corrections.

P3 Slot 1 vs. K7 Slot A = roughly equal ipc (+ or - 5% on average), but AMD usually had better value per $. Heat was poor with both, and both had somewhat crappy off-die L2 cache.

P3 Socket 370 Coppermine vs. Athlon Socket A = roughly equal ipc, again AMD usually had better value per $. Cooling the higher end models of both was problematic. A lot of people remember the 1.13ghz recall and lack of higher speed Coppermine and think the P3 was a poor chip, but really a 1ghz Coppermine vs. 1ghz Thunderbird was a wash. It's just that before long, you could get up to 1.4ghz Athlons, and P3 was kind of stuck as Intel trickled out overpriced and rare P3 Tualatins, while focusing on the even more overpriced P4 Willamette + RDRAM.

P4 Willamette was too slow at IPC due to low FSB and small L2 cache, and far too expensive to make sense when saddled with RDRAM. The only other choice was SDRAM-based mobos, and the performance was notably worse. This is the time Athlon XP really kicked butt, and socket A chipsets improved a good bit as well (NF2 ftw), along with more affordable DDR memory. This was not the end of the story though. P4 Northwood came out, and was highly overclockable and just as fast (faster in some cases) than the Athlon XP chips, even the bartons. In fact, towards the end of Socket A, the XP 3200+ lost virtually every benchmark battle with even the P4 3.0C. Many lower-priced P4 northwood models would easily overclock to 3+ghz, and of course there were many lower-priced Athlon XP procs that would clock to levels at and beyond 3200+. I'd put the AMD as the better value for the savvy overclocker with a good chipset, as the Athlon XP suffered a bit when paired with the lesser chipsets. In the end, AMD simply couldn't compete against the higher end P4s with Athlon XP, and Athlon 64 finally made it to the table.

P4 vs. Athlon 64 (single core). If you go back and look at the benches, this wasn't very cut and dry. Many benches began to significantly favor one architechture or the other. Socket 754 A64 wasn't really all that hot. P4 3.2ghz vs. A64 S754 3200+ was a coin toss in most things, and similarly $$$. But, sort of like when AMD had to let AXP eventually fade away, the higher specced S754 and especially S939 A64 chips became too much for Intel to really compete with. Prescott had usually worse IPC than Northwood, and the heat and clock throttling combined with ridiculous power usage made P4 90nm not a great thing at all.

PD vs. Athlon X2. This is something else. Because of the total lack of Intel competition on the high end, AMD started charging massive prices for their chips. Before Core 2 Duo finally hit (and even a little after IIRC), AMD was getting almost $300 for the lowest end Athlon X2-3800+, while you could pick up a Pentium D 805 for under $100. Certainly the 3800X2 was the better performer, but triple the price was insane, considering you could overclock the PD-805 to well over 3ghz (some to 4ghz with more exotic cooling), and it made a good combo with the video cards of the time. The higher end Socket 939 stuff was epically expensive, and the Socket 754 users were sort of screwed by the lack of options, sort of like Socket 478 being obsoleted when there was no Northwood replacement.

 

[Concillian]

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.

PPro owned in Quake. Best CPU in the best current game gets attention. Especially when you're talking about a world before 3D graphics cards.

I had a PPro and Tseng ET6000. That thing was THE SH** for Quake until 3Dfx busted onto the scene.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/55/3

Now imagine those Pentium II lines weren't there. I don't remember what other processors were available when I got my PPro, but I don't think an MMX 200 was out yet.

I remember it being pretty good for Descent II too. But quake was the big thing then. Descent II was a couple years old by then.

PPro 200 was crazy expensive, but a PPro 150 was much more reasonable, could overclock to 166 and was "the" processor of the "serious budget gamer" segment at the time. I still have mine somewhere. It's definitely large.

I need to pull out my notebook where I WROTE DOWN (truly old school, like my dad's friend, who still prints out his emails and keeps them in a manila folder) my old benchmarks. Most of my friends had like Pentium 133, a PPro 150 @ 166 was a HUGE upgrade. I remember I could play quake at like 640x480, while all my friends were limited to 320x240 or 400x300. Resolution differences like that were pretty big, even if Quake didn't get any less brown.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Doesn't everyone have a classic CPU collection? The PPro is the grandfather of all modern x86 CPUs; to call it historically significant is an understatement.

Yeah really, I do. I wish I still had some of the ones I used to own. I had an amazing 286-20 that I ran for 4 years.

Ah, the days when I had two MMX-200 CPUs on a Tyan mobo, running winNT4, with absolutely NO heatsinks to be found. Frickin' incredible machine. Of course, OCing wasn't part of my vocabulary then. Never ran a PPro, but have two in a box with my other antique CPUs.