[HN Gopher] 6th generation x86 CPU Comparisons
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6th generation x86 CPU Comparisons
Author : luu
Score : 117 points
Date : 2024-04-16 14:00 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.azillionmonkeys.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.azillionmonkeys.com)
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| The linked page was last updated 25 years ago.
| zik wrote:
| It's still pretty interesting though if you're into CPU
| architecture. It's an interesting little slice of history.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The P6 is the direct ancestor of the Intel Core line of CPUs,
| which is on its 14th and 15th generation on desktop and
| mobile respectively and presumably will see the 16th
| generation release later this year.
|
| (Screw the Intel Core(Ultra)<X> rebranding.)
|
| So in that sense, this is a very interesting bit of history
| that's still relevant today.
| phire wrote:
| Yeah, nearly 30 years of continual incremental improvements
| to the same P6 microarchitecture.
|
| Intel actually went back to the P6 uarch after Netburst
| (Pentium 4) failed to meet expectations. Fortunately, they
| had continue to improve P6 as a laptop focused processor
| (Pentium M). Netburst is a very interesting uarch, with a
| lot of interesting innovations. Some of those ideas (like
| hyperthreadding, the single physical register file and a
| simplified uop cache) eventually made their way back to the
| P6 uarch.
|
| And it's not just historically relevant to Intel. Other CPU
| vendors started copying the basic layout of the P6 and as
| now days the high-level views of AMD's Zen uarch and all
| high-performance AArch64 uarches look remarkably similar to
| the P6 and its decedents.
| rayiner wrote:
| When you said that I thought this was about the 1980s, not the
| late 1990s...
| agumonkey wrote:
| the 80s are forever 20 years ago
| krylon wrote:
| I could tell. It loaded nearly instantly and rendered as fast
| it was loaded. (Also, I read that article on one beautiful
| afternoon in the summer of 2008.)
| bayindirh wrote:
| As long as the information is accurate, does it matter?
| MBCook wrote:
| (1999)
| Twirrim wrote:
| Wow, Cyrix. There's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Yeah. Super Socket 7 was a great platform. Plugging cpu's from
| different manufacturers into a common socket, a choice of 3rd
| party chipsets, wide range of cpu speeds / TDP / price, and
| good longevity.
|
| These days sockets are shortlived & each manufacturer has their
| own. Or cpu's (and even RAM) soldered directly onto a board so
| you can't upgrade anything.
| krylon wrote:
| Yeah, that sucks. Used to be, one could just replace a single
| component to upgrade one's PC, soon you could no longer just
| replace the CPU, you needed a new motherboard, which also
| required new RAM. We lost something there.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| 3rd party chipsets not always a good thing.
|
| I remember consistently having reliability issues with
| Windows 98 when installed on systems with VIA chipsets, but
| almost no problems with Intel chipsets. Gigabyte motherboards
| if it makes a difference, and yes, the chipset drivers were
| installed.
| krylon wrote:
| My first PC had a Cyrix "P166+" running at 133MHz. That CPU
| used almost twice the power of a Pentium running at the same
| clock speed, yet many PC vendors put the same fans on both.
|
| As a result, under heavy load, my PC would crash rather often,
| leading me to curse audibly until somebody pointed out the
| power vs fan issue to me and recommended I get a bigger fan. So
| I did. After that, it ran pretty stable.
|
| Cyrix made a trade of in that CPU, the integer performance was
| far better than that of a Pentium at the same clock speed, the
| floating point performance lagged far behind. I got that
| machine in the summer of 1996, and then all my friends started
| playing Quake, which made me sad. Playing Quake (let alone
| Quake II) on that machine was more like staring at a slideshow.
| A 3dfx card was way outside my budget, unfortunately.
| nxobject wrote:
| From the same period, Ars wrote an excellent non-technical
| introduction to the whole generation of architectures - "RISC vs
| CISC: the Post-RISC Era". [1]
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/features/1999/10/rvc/
| eeeficus wrote:
| Jon Stokes also wrote Inside the machine[1], a great
| introduction to microprocessors architecture.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Machine-Introduction-
| Microproc...
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Does anyone know what the latest/newest generation is?
|
| With the i3/i5/i7/i9 naming convention I have lost track Unless
| i3.1s have essentially the same architecture as i3.xxx newest.
| pkaye wrote:
| I think Meteor Lake is the upcoming generation. They are using
| big (P) and small cores (E) and chiplet technology (like AMD).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Lake
| chx wrote:
| Meteor Lake is out.
|
| The next ones are Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids on the
| server side, Arrow Lake on the desktop and Lunar Lake on the
| laptop.
|
| And then comes Panther Lake supposedly next year which is
| both desktop and laptop and Gelsinger admitted betting the
| company on the 18A process it is using.
|
| We shall see.
| rwmj wrote:
| Wikipedia is the best source for this as its confusing unless
| you deal with it every day. FWIW Raptor Lake
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake) is Intel's codename
| for its 13th & 14th generation of Core processors, and the one
| after will be called Arrow Lake and Meteor Lake (depending on
| if desktop or mobile).
| Sharlin wrote:
| Intel Core is an eighth-generation microarchitecture, and the
| most recent Intel desktop CPUs are 14th gen Core processors. So
| the current generation is "8.14" as it were; the basic
| architecture is still more or less the same as it was 15 years
| ago.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| What a great read. Thank you Paul Hsieh.
|
| I think the website is also a great design and implementation.
| Given that it was last updated in 1999 the design is original not
| a retro creation.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| What a great read. Thank you Paul Hsieh.
|
| I think the website is also a great design and implementation.
| Given that it was last updated in 1999 the design is original not
| a retro creation.
|
| When did Transmeta join the fray?
| anticensor wrote:
| The 7th generation comparisons:
| http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/cpujihad.shtml
| boricj wrote:
| There's an in-depth video that compares the performance of
| Quake's software renderer on the Pentium MMX versus the AMD K6 at
| the micro-architecture level:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWVhIvZlytc
|
| The most interesting insight in there is how the former manages
| to outperform the latter in this specific case due to a pipeline
| quirk in the FDIV instruction, despite the fact it is a previous
| generation, in-order design vs a next generation, out-of-order
| design.
| krylon wrote:
| > [The Pentium II] was the first processor (I knew of) to have
| completely documented post-RISC features such as dynamic
| execution, out of order execution and retirement. (PA-RISC
| predated it as far as implementing the technology, however; I am
| suspicious that HP told Intel to either work with them on Merced,
| or be sued up the wazoo.)
|
| With some hindsight available now, does anybody know if there is
| something to this suspicion? Intel being far less enthusiastic
| about Itanium than HP did look weird to me. Then again, that was
| years later when Itanium was actually available and nobody except
| HP showed any interest in using them.
| sillywalk wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, the CDC 6400 had some OoO execution in
| 1964, and the IBM 360 model 91 had register renaming and full
| OoO in 1966, and IBM POWER1 had OoO in 1990.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution
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(page generated 2024-04-20 23:02 UTC)