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Poll: The best CPU ever

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<< DEEP BLUE (or whatever that machine is ran on) >>



seeing as how the 386 was the first(and best!) 32 bit processor, i'm guessing its run by about 30 million of them 🙂

Lets keep this Post going, good topic JonJon.
 
i'm gonna go with the pentium pro. it ushured in the p6 design, upon which intel has relied on almost entirly of the last 3.5 years, and upon which it will rely for at least another year. it had amazing longevity, coming out in 1995 at 200MHz, and because of its RISC core and strong FPU performance i didn't feel the need to replace mine until march, and a friend with the same didn't until august.
 
There goes that Modus again with his proprietary word definitions. I happen to think the XR3i at £750 2nd hand is a good deal but obviously Ferraris are better cars.
I know little about most chips but I think the Z80 must really have been a whizz in its time. I have one in my 2 spectrums. It runs at 3-4MHz whereas the 6502 was at 1 and a bit MHz, and the 6502 instruction set was terse. Both the chips were around at the same time.
The Pentium Pro was very much admired in its time.
I personally would put my money into a Duron right now though, I don't need the last 5% of performance of a Thunderbird.
 
you don't have itanium on there. just thinking about the ISA makes me drool.

I thinkt the picaJava is second to Itanium. I guess I'm just sick of the x86 ISA.
 
definitely the 386, that chip lasted for like 5 years. And it was a giant step above the 286 memory and speed wise. You guys must not have been in computers very long considering all the votes for durons and k7s
 
Cray's comps used MIPS's AFAIK.

As for best CPU, Ill have to go with the Alpha EV6.
Quite old by now, and still outperforming everything else out there, heck not even the US-3 or PA-RISC's can touch it.
 
I was just going to say that(about Crays) Sunner, looks like you beat me to it🙂(BTW- They still use MIPS).

I would say the *best*, all things considered is the Athlon T-Bird/Duron, though that is an ever changing thing.

Best overall performance, size, heat, actual application flexibility, and cost be d@mned, then the Alpha.

Best &quot;breakthrough&quot; for the masses then the 386(followed closely by the P6 core).

Most scaleable, IBM's &quot;Power&quot;(a souped up PPC) chips(see Deep Blue and others).

Best value, tough call between current Durons and the Celery 300A.

I can't pick one winner, it is like asking which is the best car ever, it depends greatly on what you are looking for.
 
Personal favorite, due strictly to nostalgia: 65c02.

People were doing magic with it a long time ago. Like an elegant and integrated applications suite that ran from a 5.25&quot; floppy diskette. I miss my green screen. -sniff-
 
The DEC Alpha is the best, in my opinion. Honestly I couldn't care less what &quot;got us here today&quot; in the x86 industry. Who cares? The 386 was good for its time, and that's that. There's no way in hell it is &quot;the best&quot; cpu.

-RSI
 
Well, I guess I have to revise my choice of the 80286. I had forgotten that the 80386 brought us 32 bit processing, which clearly makes it more important and revolutionary. I was really pleased to see that I wasn't the only crank who thought the Zilog Z80 deserved to be up there, as far as longevity I don't think the Z80 design can be beaten. BTW, I was investigating TI-85 sites on the web (the TI-85 uses a 6MHz Z80) and I found that there are at least a couple of people who replaced one of the resistors on the TI-85 board and got the Z80 to run at 24MHz! 300% overclocking ability! Of course the life of those four AAA batteries dwindled significantly but it's still amazing.

Aaron Meyer
 
Pentium Pro - Intel actually tried to make a decent hack of the x86, Microsoft screws it up of course.

Ziglog Z80 - This chip was in everything from video game consoles to VCRs.
 
It's interesting that people should note the Z80 so much. It reminds me of why people kept choosing the x86 for whatever piece of equipment. The reason was the projected maintenance and programming costs. In silicon valley &quot;you couldn't swing a cat without hitting someone who could program x86&quot;. So although other designs were looking superior for performance or cost so far as the chip goes, x86 proved cost effective.
 
you guys have some very interesting comments...i'm learning alot about cpu history...thanx guys, i hope we can keep this thread going for awhile. also i posted a chipset poll so don't forget to vote for that 🙂
 


<< I was investigating TI-85 sites on the web (the TI-85 uses a 6MHz Z80) and I found that there are at least a couple of people who replaced one of the resistors on the TI-85 board and got the Z80 to run at 24MHz! 300% overclocking ability! >>



is it just me or does 6 go into 24 4 times??? ummm, that would be 400% would it not??? damn, i wish my T-Bird 900 could do 400%
 
Hmm, x86? I'm a big AMD fan, but come on guys the only thing that makes the whole x86 line popular was/is open architecture. Not performance(although x86 outperforms anything now in the home market) and not innovation(most of the truly innovative hardware/software for x86 was first developed on other platforms).

Alpha? Most of us will never use one nevermind own one.

My vote goes(or would go to, if available in the poll) the Motorola 68xx series. The first Mac's, Atari's, and Amiga's were based on this awesome cpu series. On these platforms was developed the first GUI OS's, Desktop publishing/Desktop video/Desktop Audio/Hypertext, a number of hardware innovations such as firewire, and the groundwork was laid for the DirectX API. All 3 of the above mentioned implementations of the Motorola 68xx were a good decade ahead of the x86 world! All except the Mac failed to survive, but the reason that they didn't replace x86 was only because of x86's &quot;Open Architecture&quot;.
 
Overclocking something 10% would be multiplying it's speed by 1.1 (1.0 + 10%)...the same would go for 300% (1.0 + 300% = 4x)
 
At time I bought C300a (pretested at 450 for extra $20), P2-450 were going for $500-600. Paid $125, retail Malaysian. $400 free perf (no extra voltage). That's why they call it 'the *legendary* C300a'. 🙂
 
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