Poll: What was the most ground breaking consumer desktop CPU?

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: UMfanatic
THe A64 brought the level of play and competition to a whole new level, pentium did not even come into the 64bit market until this year

What? :laugh:

All Pentium 6XX cpu's, as well as all 5X1 cpu's, and all Pentium D cpu's were 64bit.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

i must show respect to the athlon xp. it won the race to 1GHz, offered outstanding value throughout it's lifetime, and established amd as a contender.

 

[Hulk]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Hulk
The Cyrix MediaGX....I don't recall anything amazing about that chip
Pentium III - All the same family, Coppermine and Tualatin moved to on-die cache

The MediaGX was from a different manufacturer than either the Pentium or K2 CPU's. It may have not been amazing, but that could be said about the P2 & K6-2 also.
I recall the move to Coppermine as a pretty big deal in the P3 world.
The P4 Willamette is a different animal than the other "P4" processors.

Yes, I do recall the Cyrix MediaGX. If I remember correctly it was not remotely competitive with it's Intel counterpart.

I have to disagree with your assessment about the PII. The PII was a big deal. The Pentium Pro upon which the PII was based was a great server chip, but did not perform well in Windows. Intel tweaked the Pentium Pro and turned it into the Pentium II which as a great windows performer. The Pentium II was the first chip to be able to natively decode MPEG-2 for one thing, it make video editing of full scale D1 video a reality without hardware acceleration. In addition the Core 2 Duo's design goes all the way back to the Pentium II.

Yes, Coppermine was a big deal but for the sake of not having a poll with 40 choices I choose to limit it to major players. But it will still basically a PIII with on-die full-speed cache.

 

[RebateMonger]

A big breakthrough after the 8088 was the 486/66. This was the first major processor to allow the CPU to run at a different speed than the motherboard and memory. The earlier 486/50 required that the motherboard and memory run at the same 50MHz, which proved problematic. Without this critical step, we'd still be running 33MHz processors.

 

[rudder]

you motorolacist!

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Celeron 366@550 y0! 😀

- M4H

 

[Vic]

Athlon T-bird. 1st to 1GHz. DDR FSB. Full speed on-chip cache. These were really the first processors to operate at what would still be considered modern processing speeds for everyday usage.

The original Pentiums really weren't all that impressive, and performance wasn't that much of a step over the 486. The slot Pentium II's, with integrated (but still not on-chip) cache, 100 MHz FSB, and SDRAM were a lot more impressive.

 

[SexyK]

I can' t believe I'm the only one who voted for the Pentium II. It brough the truly revolutionary features of the Pentium Pro to the desktop. It was a much more advanced core than the original Pentium and provided the true basis for the P III -> P-M -> Core -> Core 2 development.

 

[Oyeve]

The 386! I cant believe you didnt put this! First cpu to use 32bit! Cmon! Broke the mem barrier, all sorts of inovations from the 386!

Oh, 1993. Well the Pentium Pro then! 🙂

 

[Ecgtheow]

Originally posted by: Astaroth33
Motorola 6502, yo! (ok, so it's more than 10 years old..)

MOS Technology made the 6502, not Motorola.

 

[bendixG15]

80286 .... bang

I think that was the first processor AMD made under license from Intel.
Don't remember if they made the 8086 or the 8088

 

[Oyeve]

Z20 trumps all.

 

[SexyK]

Originally posted by: Oyeve
The 386! I cant believe you didnt put this! First cpu to use 32bit! Cmon! Broke the mem barrier, all sorts of inovations from the 386!

Oh, 1993. Well the Pentium Pro then! 🙂

P-Pro wasn't really a consumer desktop CPU - so you gotta go Pentium II! Join the bandwagon, we're up to 2 votes now! 😉

 

[Rubycon]

Yes the P6 was ahead of its time. Really ahead when you consider a lot of people are using P4's. :laugh:

Anyway perhaps it wasn't a consumer desktop processor. But those of us that use workstations - it was pure candy. After all everyone else with pentiums were amateur! 😛

I thought it was funny how fast Duke Nukem 3D played and Microsoft Golf! Hehe the swing was so fast it was ridiculous. 16 bit performance was slow due to the lack of a segment descriptor cache and that was "fixed" with the Pee Too but those Klammath things were hot as hell and the half speed off die cache just didn't cut it. MMX? Who cared? The Pro was still king! I even had a 512KB chip that ran stable at 266. The other one could only do 233 so I settled for 233x2 on that Tyan S1668 board. 512MB BEDO ECC memory and ouch that was expensive nearly 10 years ago. :Q

 

[Hulk]

Maybe Anand will pop in and vote for the K6-III. If I remember he was fond of that chip. If it just had better floating point performance.... and oh yeah, if AMD could have actually made enough of them so they could have been available!

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Hulk
Maybe Anand will pop in and vote for the K6-III. If I remember he was fond of that chip. If it just had better floating point performance.... and oh yeah, if AMD could have actually made enough of them so they could have been available!

Chompers had more than adequate FPU performance. It was miles above the K5 and certainly Cyrix. :Q

The K6 233 was a very viable contender to the P55C-233 part in the socket 7 realm.

Of course the 233MMX o/c to 292 was interesting.

I guess we'll never see a unified socket again - where you buy a socket x whatever board and can use AMD or Intel.

 

[sonoma1993]

I'd say the Pentium with mmx or the Athlon 64

 

[SsupernovaE]

For me it was the Pentium 200 MHz with MMX. Before I had a 486 SX and cannot use it long after I lost use of my hands. The Pentium changed that along with Dragon Dictate.

 

[Treripica]

It's kinda hard for me to tell after the compliementary components really started shouldering the load(the 486DX kinda got that started, but that's OOS). When we had DMA allowing allowing disk writes without having to check with Papa Proc, and the GPU worked on the display without excessive supervision, the CPU could really start doing work.

I think the Pentium Pro wowed me the most with its performance for the time and what was being done with its architecture and implementations.

The PPro brought us on-die L2 cache running at processor speed and (I thought)really made serious inroads for SMP. It got dogged by the math bug and its 16-bit performance, however, and the price has already been discussed. However, it brought about a lot of what makes its descendents speedy today(P4EE picked up the price gene many years later 😛).

 

[secretanchitman]

pentium, followed by core 2 duo.