[HN Gopher] PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the...
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PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with
AMD's Athlon
Author : LorenDB
Score : 148 points
Date : 2026-03-07 14:10 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| mtucker502 wrote:
| What progress is being made in overcoming the current thermal
| limits blocking us from high clock rates (10Ghz+)?
| magic_man wrote:
| The energy consumed is cv^2f. It makes no sense to keep
| increasing frequency as you make power way worse.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| So heat. There's efforts to switch to optics which don't have
| that heat problem so much but have the problem that it's
| really hard to build an optical transistor. + anywhere your
| interfacing with the electrical world you're back to the heat
| problem.
|
| Maybe reversible computing will help unlock several more
| orders of magnitude of growth.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| At lower frequencies, leakage current plays a larger role
| than gate capacitance, so for any given process node, there's
| a sweet spot. For medium to low loads, it takes less power to
| rapidly switch between cutting off power to a core, and
| running at a higher frequency than is needed, than to run at
| a lower frequency.
|
| Newer process nodes decrease the per-gate capacitance,
| increasing the optimal operating frequency.
| vessenes wrote:
| Like any doubling rule, the buck has to stop somewhere. Higher
| energy usage + smaller geometry means much more exotic analog
| physics to worry about in chips. I'm not a silicon engineer by
| any means but I'd expect 10Ghz cycles will be optical or very
| exotically cooled or not coming at us at all.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Reaching 10 GHz for a CPU will never be done in silicon.
|
| It could be done if either silicon will be replaced with
| another semiconductor or semiconductors will be replaced with
| something else for making logical gates, e.g. with organic
| molecules, to be able to design a logical gate atom by atom.
|
| For the first variant, i.e. replacing silicon with another
| semiconductor, research is fairly advanced, but this would
| increase the fabrication cost so it will be done only when
| any methods for further improvements of silicon integrated
| circuits will become ineffective or too expensive, which is
| unlikely to happen earlier than a decade from now.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Overclockers are pretty close.
| adrian_b wrote:
| What can be done by raising the power consumption per
| core to hundreds of watt, while cooling the package with
| liquid nitrogen, is completely irrelevant for what can be
| done with a CPU that must operate reliably for years and
| at an acceptable cost for the energy consumption.
|
| For the latter case, 6 GHz has been barely reached, in
| CPUs that cannot be produced in large quantities and
| whose reliability is dubious.
| FpUser wrote:
| Having RAM read / write faster will be of way more benefit
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| What would be the benefit? You don't need a 10GHz processor to
| browse the web, or edit a spreadsheet, and in any case things
| like that are already multi-threaded.
|
| The current direction of adding more cores makes more sense,
| since this is really what CPU intensive programs generally need
| - more parallelism.
| nurettin wrote:
| Single core speed is absolutely a thing that is needed and
| preferred to multicore. That's why we have avx, amx, etc.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Meh, avx is also just parallelism. That won't get you
| around Amdahl's law.
| nurettin wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. It lets you do 64 operations with
| one instruction. Where's the diminishing returns?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Vector or matrix instructions do not improve single-
| thread speed in the correct meaning of this term, because
| they cannot improve the speed of a program that executes
| a sequence of dependent operations.
|
| Their purpose is to provide parallel execution at a lower
| cost in die area and at a better energy efficiency than
| by multiplying the number of cores. For instance, having
| 16 cores with 8-wide vector execution units provides the
| same throughput as 128 cores, but at a much lower power
| consumption and at a much smaller die area. However, both
| structures need groups of 128 independent operations
| every clock cycle, to keep busy all execution units.
|
| The terms "single-thread" performance vs. "multi-
| threaded" performance are not really correct.
|
| What matters is the 2 performance values that
| characterize a CPU when executing a set of independent
| operations vs. executing a set of operations that are
| functionally-dependent, i.e. the result of each operation
| is an operand for the next operation.
|
| When executing a chain of dependent operation, the
| performance is determined by the sum of the latencies of
| the operations and it is very difficult to improve the
| performance otherwise than by raising the clock
| frequency.
|
| On the other hand, when the operations are independent,
| they can be executed concurrently and with enough
| execution units the performance may be limited only by
| the operation with the longest duration, no matter how
| many other operations are executed in parallel.
|
| For parallel execution, there are many implementation
| methods that are used together, because for most of them
| there are limits for the maximum multiplication factor,
| caused by constraints like the lengths of the
| interconnection traces on the silicon die.
|
| So some of the concurrently executed operations are
| executed in different stages of an execution pipeline,
| others are executed in different execution pipelines
| (superscalar execution), others are executed in different
| SIMD lanes of a vector execution pipeline, others are
| executed in different CPU cores of the same CPU complex,
| others are executed in different CPU cores that are
| located on separate dies in the same package, others are
| executed in CPU cores located in a different socket in
| the same motherboard, others in CPU cores located in
| other cases in the same rack, and so on.
|
| Instead of the terms "single-thread performance" and
| "multi-threaded performance" it would have been better to
| talk about performance for dependent operations and
| performance for independent operations.
|
| There is little if anything that can be done by a
| programmer to improve the performance for the execution
| of a chain of dependent instructions. This is determined
| by the design and the fabrication of the CPU.
|
| On the other either the compiler or the programmer must
| ensure that the possibility of executing operations in
| parallel is exploited at the maximum extent possible, by
| using various means, e.g. creating multiple threads,
| which will be scheduled on different CPU cores, using the
| available SIMD instructions and interleaving any chains
| of dependent instructions, so that the adjacent
| instructions will be independent and they will be
| executed either in different pipeline stages or in
| different execution pipelines. Most modern CPUs use out-
| of-order execution, so the exact order of interleaved
| dependent instructions is not critical, because they will
| be reordered by the CPU, but some interleaving done by
| the compiler or by the programmer is still necessary,
| because the hardware uses a limited instruction window
| within which reordering is possible.
| vaylian wrote:
| You technically don't even need a 300MHz processor for the
| use cases that you name. But Intel and others kept developing
| faster CPUs anyway.
| moffkalast wrote:
| For parallelism we already have SIMD units like AVX and
| well... GPUs. CPUs need higher single thread speeds for tasks
| that simply cannot make effective use of it.
| michaelt wrote:
| Because someone decided to write all the software in
| javascript and python, which don't benefit from the added
| cores.
| hulitu wrote:
| > You don't need a 10GHz processor to browse the web, or edit
| a spreadsheet,
|
| To browse the web is debatable. But for svchost.exe, Teams,
| Office 365 and Notepad, you definitely need one. /s
|
| Programming is a lost art.
| brennanpeterson wrote:
| None for normal.compute, since energy density is still
| fundamental. But the interesting option is cryogenic computing,
| which can have zero switching energy, and 10s of GHz clock
| rates
|
| Some neat startups to watch for in this space.
| sparkie wrote:
| That's not going to happen, but there's alternative research
| such as [1] where we get rid of the clock and use self-timed
| circuits.
|
| [1]:https://arc.cecs.pdx.edu/
| amelius wrote:
| There have been overclockers who reached 9GHz using liquid
| helium.
|
| It's simply impossible at room temperatures without extreme
| cooling.
|
| Also you will run into interconnect speed issues, since 10GHz
| corresponds to .1 nanoseconds which corresponds to 3
| centimeters (assuming lightspeed, in reality this is lower).
|
| So sadly, we'll be stuck in this "clock-speed winter" for a
| little longer.
| dd_xplore wrote:
| I remember back in 2006 I used to browse overclock forums to
| overclock my pentium 4, I tons of fun consuming lots of
| instructions, I learned the bios, changed PLL clocks, mem clocks
| etc.
| rckclmbr wrote:
| I bought a car radiator and dremeled out my case, visited Home
| Depot for all the tubes and connectors. It's too easy nowadays
| to add watercooling
| Sharlin wrote:
| The i486DX 33MHz was introduced in May 1990. A 30x increase, or
| about five doublings, in clock speeds over ten years. That's of
| course not the whole truth; the Athlon could do much more in one
| cycle than the 486. In any case, in 2010 we clearly did not have
| 30GHz processors - by then, the era of exponentially rising clock
| speeds was very decidedly over. I bought an original quadcore i7
| in 2009 and used it for the next _fifteen years_. In that time,
| roughly one doubling in the number of cores and one doubling in
| clock speeds occurred.
| adrian_b wrote:
| "The era of exponentially rising clock speeds" was already over
| in 2003, when the 130-nm Pentium 4 reached 3.2GHz.
|
| All the later CMOS fabrication processes, starting with the
| 90-nm process (in 2004), have provided only very small
| improvements in the clock frequency, so that now, 23 years
| later after 2003, the desktop CPUs have not reached a double
| clock frequency yet.
|
| In the history of computers, the decade with the highest rate
| of clock frequency increase has been 1993 to 2003, during which
| the clock frequency has increased from 67 MHz in 1993 in the
| first Pentium, up to 3.2 GHz in the last Northwood Pentium 4.
| So the clock frequency had increased almost 50 times during
| that decade.
|
| For comparison, in the previous decade, 1983 to 1993, the clock
| frequency in mass-produced CPUs had increased only around 5
| times, i.e. at a rate about 10 times slower than in the next
| decade.
| hedora wrote:
| Sort of: The Pentium 4 was a strange chip. It had way too
| many pipeline steps, and was basically just chasing high
| clock speed marketing numbers instead of performance. In
| other words, it hit "3.2GHz" by cheating.
|
| I'd argue you'd need to use AMD's Athlon XP or 64 bit
| processors, or either Pentium 3 / Core 2 Duo to figure out
| when clock speeds stopped increasing.
| crest wrote:
| One crazy detail about the Pentium 4 is that even at 3.2GHz
| the simple integer ALUs ran at twice the clock speed. Which
| allows the cursed thing to run two add with carry
| instructions per cycle.
| layer8 wrote:
| On the plus side, the 486DX-33 didn't require active cooling.
| The second half of the 1990s was when home computing started to
| become noisy, and the art of trying to build silent PCs began.
| johnflan wrote:
| The CPU didn't but the chonker of a fan in the PSU sure made
| up for it
| giantrobot wrote:
| AND THOSE WHISPERING QUIET HARD DRIVES!
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is true that we haven't seen single core clock speeds
| increasing as fast, for a long while now. And I think everyone
| agrees that some nebulously defined "rate of computing
| progress" has slowed down.
|
| But, we can be slightly less pessimistic if we're more
| specific. Already by the early 90's, a lot of the clock speed
| increase came from strategies like pipelines, superscalar
| instructions, branch prediction. Instruction level parallelism.
| Then in 200X we started using additional parallelism strategies
| like multicore and SMT.
|
| It isn't a _meaningless_ distinction. There's a real difference
| between parallelism that the compiler and hardware can usually
| figure out, and parallelism that the programmer usually has to
| expose.
|
| But there's some artificiality to it. We're talking about the
| ability of parallel hardware to provide the illusion of
| sequential execution. And we know that if we want full "single
| threaded" performance, we have to think about the instruction
| level parallelism. It's just implicit rather than explicit like
| thread-level parallelism. And the explicit parallelism is right
| there in any modern compiler.
|
| If the syntax of C was slightly different, to the point where
| it could automatically add OpenMP pragmas to all it's for
| loops, we'd have 30GHz processors by now, haha.
| hedora wrote:
| Clock speed increases definitely slowed down, but now that
| software can use parallelism better, we're seeing big wins
| again. Current desktop/laptop packages are doing 100 trillion
| operations per second. The article's processor could do one
| floating point op per cycle, or 1B ops. So, we've seen a
| 100,000x speedup in the last 25 years. That's a doubling every
| ~ 1.5 years since 2000.
|
| It's not quite apples-to-apples, of course, due to floating
| point precision decreasing since then, vectorization, etc, but
| it's not like progress stopped in 2000!
| lysace wrote:
| Web browsing is still largely single/few-threaded in
| practice, afaik. (Right?)
| xnx wrote:
| The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to
| 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or
| better with architectural improvements).
|
| Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of
| going from spinning disks to SSDs.
| HPsquared wrote:
| SSDs were such a revolution though, and a really rewarding
| upgrade. I'd fit SSDs to friend and family computers as an
| upgrade.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| I once had a decade old Thinkpad that suddenly became my new
| work laptop once more thanks to an SSD. It's a true shame
| they simply don't make them like this anymore.
| micv wrote:
| Getting my first SSD was absolutely the best computer upgrade
| I've ever bought. I didn't even realise how annoying load
| times were because I was so used to them and coming from C64s
| and Amigas even spinning rust seemed fairly quick.
|
| It took a long time before I felt a need to improve my PC's
| performance again after that.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| There were quite a few mind blowing upgrades back in the
| day. The first sound card instead of PC beeper was one of
| my most memorable moments.
|
| I remember loading up Doom, plugging my shitty earplugs
| that had a barely long enough cable and hearing the "real"
| shotgun sound for the first time. Oo-wee
| dcminter wrote:
| Just before I installed an SSD was the last time I owned a
| computer that felt slow.
| patwolf wrote:
| I owe much of my career to an SSD. I had a work laptop that I
| upgraded myself with an 80GB Intel SSD, which was pretty
| exotic at the time. It was so fast at grepping through code
| that I could answer colleagues' questions about the code in
| nearly real time. It was like having a superpower.
| st_goliath wrote:
| > The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time.
|
| About a week ago, completely out of the blue, YouTube
| recommended this old gem to me:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM
|
| A Pentium 4, overclocked to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling.
|
| Watching this was such an amazing throwback. I remember clearly
| the last time I saw it, which was when an excited friend showed
| it to me on a PC at our schools library. A year or so before
| YouTube even existed.
|
| By 2005, my Pentium 4 Prescott at home had some 3.6GHz without
| overclocking, 4GHz models for the consumer market were already
| announced (but plagued by delays), but surely 10GHz was "just a
| few more years away".
| fnord77 wrote:
| only just last year did someone goose a PC cpu to 9.13ghz
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-
| components/cpus/core-i9-1490...
| accrual wrote:
| IIRC, part of the GHz problem is that very long pipelines
| like that of the Pentium 4 tend to show increasing benefits
| at higher clocks. If you can keep the pipeline full then the
| system reaps the benefits. Sort of like a drag racer - goes
| very fast in a straight line but terrible on corners.
|
| But with longer pipelines comes larger penalties when the
| pipeline needs to be flushed, so the P4 eventually hit a wall
| and Intel returned to the late Pentium 3 Tualatin core,
| refining it into the Pentium M which later evolved into the
| first Core CPUs.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception
| of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
|
| "Bananas" core-counts gave me the same experience. Some year
| ago I moved to Ryzen Threadripper and experienced similar "Wow,
| compiling this project is now 4x faster" or "processing this
| TBs of data is now 8x faster", but of course it's very specific
| to specific workloads where concurrency and parallism is
| thought of from the ground up, not a general 2x speed up in
| everything.
| geon wrote:
| GPUs for 3d graphics were a game changer.
|
| I can see why you wouldn't consider it as impactful if you
| weren't into gaming at the time.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's
| Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) the steady
| across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to
| programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern
| computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than
| an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.
|
| SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each individual
| computer, but trickled their way into market saturation over a
| generation or two of computers, so you'd be effectively running
| the same software but in a much more responsive environment.
| vachina wrote:
| > Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more
| responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was
| running on a computer 25 years ago.
|
| I feel this. Humanity has peaked.
| accrual wrote:
| Every time Discord updates (which is often) I'm like "cool,
| slightly more code to run on the same hardware..."
| idiotsecant wrote:
| This is silly. That's like saying that machines haven't
| gotten any better because a helicopter doesn't eat any less
| hay than a horse did.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| I don't follow your analogy. Can you elaborate?
| anthk wrote:
| Debian Sarge, Kopete with KDE3: 256M of RAM, AMD Athlon
| 2000.
|
| Windows 11, Discord: 4GB are not enough to run it _well_.
|
| FYI, Kopete allowed inline LaTeX, Youtube videos (low res,
| ok, 480p maybe, but it worked), emoticos, animations,
| videoconference, themes, maybe basic HTML tags and whatnot.
| And it ran fast.
| gavinsyancey wrote:
| > Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more
| responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was
| running on a computer 25 years ago.
|
| The only thing more impressive that hardware engineers'
| delivering continuous massive performance improvements for
| the past several decades is software engineers' ability to
| completely erase that with more and more bloated programs to
| do essentially the same thing.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| You joke, but it really is more work. Iv'e developed
| software in languages from assembly language to JavaScript,
| and for any given functionality it's been easier to write
| it in RISC assembly language running directly than to get
| something working reliably in JavaScript running on a
| framework in an interpreter in a VM in a web browser, where
| it's impossible to reliably know what a call is going to
| do, because everything is undocumented and untested.
|
| One of the co-signers of the Agile Manifesto had previously
| stated that "The best way to get the right answer on the
| Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong
| answer." (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ward_C
| unningham#L...) I'm convinced that the Agile Manifesto was
| an attempt to make an internet post of the most-wrong way
| to manage a software projects, in hopes someone would
| correct it with the right answer, but instead it was
| adopted as-is.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| What's the most complex thing you wrote in RISC assembly?
| dale_glass wrote:
| What makes Agile the most-wrong way to manage, in your
| opinion? I'm curious.
| majormajor wrote:
| Anytime you upgraded from a 4 year old computer to a new one
| back then - from 16Mhz to 90Mhz, or 75Mhz to 333Mhz, or
| 333Mhz to 1Ghz, or whatever - it was immediate, it was
| visceral.
|
| SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were a
| very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of night-
| and-day 80s/90s era change.
|
| The software, in those days, was similarly making much bigger
| leaps every few years. 256 colors to millions, resolution,
| capabilities (real time spellcheck! a miracle at the time.) A
| chat app isn't a great comparison. Games are the most extreme
| example - Sim City to Sim City 2000; Doom to Quake; Unreal
| Tournament to Battlefield 1942 - but consider also a 1995 web
| browser vs a 1999 one.
| nucleardog wrote:
| > SSDs booted faster and launched programs faster and were
| a very nice change, but they weren't that same sort of
| night-and-day 80s/90s era change.
|
| For me they were.
|
| I still remember the first PC I put together for someone
| with a SSD.
|
| I had a quite beefy machine at the time and it would take
| 30 seconds or more to boot Windows, and around 45s to fully
| load Photoshop.
|
| Built this machine someone with entirely low-end (think
| like "i3" not "Celeron") components, but it was more than
| enough for what they wanted it for. It would hit the
| desktop in around 10 seconds, and photoshop was ready to go
| in about 2 seconds.
|
| (Or thereabouts--I did time it, but I'm remembering numbers
| from like a decade and a half ago.)
|
| For a _lot_ of operations, the SSD made an order of
| magnitude difference. Blew my mind at the time.
| majormajor wrote:
| Sure, but what about once Photoshop was open? Aka where
| you spend most of your day after you start up your stuff?
|
| Would you take the SSD and a 500Mhz processor or a 2Ghz
| dual-core with a 7200k or 10000k HD? "Some operations are
| faster" vs "every single thing is wildly faster" of the
| every-few-years quadrupling+ of CPU perf, memory amounts,
| disk space, etc.
|
| (45sec to load Photoshop also isn't tracking with my
| memory, though 30s-1min boot certainly is, but I'm not
| invested enough to go try to dig up my G4 PowerBook and
| test it out... :) )
| phil21 wrote:
| SSDs came out after CPUs started to slow down on doubling
| (single threaded) performance every 12-18mo or so.
|
| So it was the only way to get that visceral improvement
| in user experience like CPU and platform upgrades were in
| the mid 90's to very early 00's.
|
| The experience of just slapping a new SSD in a 3 year old
| machine was similar to a different generation of computer
| nerds.
|
| Nothing could really match the night and day difference
| of an _entire machine_ being double to triple the
| performance in a single upgrade though. Not even the
| upgrade from spinning disks to SSD. You 'd go from a game
| being unplayable on your old PC to it being smooth as
| butter overnight. Not these 20% incremental improvements.
| Sure, load times didn't get too much better - but those
| started to matter more when the CPU upgrades were no
| longer a defining experience.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| That's my point, the software was getting bloated at least
| as fast as the CPUs were getting faster, so you had to
| upgrade to a new CPU every few years to run the latest
| software. With SSDs, there was a huge overlap in CPU speeds
| that may or may not have an SSD, so upgrading to one meant
| a huge performance boost, within the same set of runnable
| software.
|
| Also, going from Sim City to Sim City 2000 was pre-bloat.
| Over the course of five years, the new version was
| significantly better than the original, but they both
| target the same 486 processor generation, which was brand
| new when the original SimCity was released, but rather old
| by the time SimCity 2000 was released. Another five years
| later, Sim City 3000 added minimal functionality, but
| required not just a Pentium processor, but a fast one.
|
| I guess what I'm getting at is that a faster CPU means
| programs released after it will run better, but faster
| storage means that all programs, old and new, will run
| better.
| steve1977 wrote:
| > That's my point, the software was getting bloated at
| least as fast as the CPUs were getting faster
|
| I think there's a difference between bloat and actually
| useful features or performance.
|
| For example, I started making music with computers in the
| early 90s. They were only powerful enough to control
| external equipment like synthesizers.
|
| Nowadays, I can do everything I could do with all that
| equipment on an iPad! I would not call that bloat.
|
| On the other hand, comparing MS Teams to say ICQ, yeah, a
| lot of that is bloat.
| myself248 wrote:
| > in the early 90s. They were only powerful enough to
| control external equipment like synthesizers.
|
| Tell that to ScreamTracker!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| In case anyone's wondering:
|
| https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw
| prmoustache wrote:
| Screamtracker was sampling. Great for the days and much
| more accesible for the teenager I was than buying and
| controlling synths but that was not exactly same. More a
| competition to the early akai MPCs.
|
| And we were mostly ripping those samples from records on
| cassettes and CDs, or other mods.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Well now that you mention that, my very first steps
| actually were with Soundmonitor on a C64, one of the OG
| trackers probably (even though not called tracker yet
| IIRC). I kind of forgot about that, as that was still
| very amateurish (I mean what I made with it, not the
| software).
|
| https://www.c64-wiki.de/images/f/f1/rockmon3.png
|
| Or also at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-
| iPrbw&t=400s in the video already linked below. And yes,
| I had to type in that listing.
| jstanley wrote:
| There is definitely bloat. A few months ago I was messing
| about with making a QWERTY piano in a web page, and it
| was utterly unplayable due to the bloat-induced latency
| in between the fingers and the ears.
| y1n0 wrote:
| For me, at 52, I recall the SSD transformation to be near
| miraculous. I never once felt that way about a CPU upgrade
| until getting an M1. I went from a cyrix 5x86 133 (which
| was effectively a fast 486) to a pentium II 266 and it just
| wasn't that impressive.
|
| The drag down of swapping became almost a non-issue with
| the SSD changeover.
|
| I suppose going from a //e to a IIgs was that kind of leap
| but that was more about the whole computer than a cpu.
|
| Now I have to say, swapping to an SSD on my windows
| machines at work was far less impressive than going to SSD
| with my macs. I sort of wrote that off as all the anivirus
| crap that was running. It was very disappointing compared
| to the transformation on mac. On my macs it was like I
| suddenly heard the hallelujah chorus when I powered on.
| aurareturn wrote:
| I agree. There were only 2 game changing upgrades for me.
| One was hard disk to SSD. The other was x86 laptop to M1.
| ubercore wrote:
| I went 386 DX 33 to a Pentium 75, which wasn't a wild
| amount of time. I'd argue that's way bigger than when I
| got an SSD (but I agree SSD was a huge improvement).
| dep_b wrote:
| C64 1982 Amiga 1985
|
| Never witnessed anything before or after with that jump in
| specs
| IshKebab wrote:
| Nah I agree with him. Spinning disks were always a huge
| bottleneck (remember how long MS Word took to open?) and
| SSD's basically fixed that overnight. The CPU advancements
| were big, but software had a chance to "catch up" (i.e. get
| less efficient) because they it was a gradual change. That
| didn't really happen with SSDs because the change was so
| sudden and big.
|
| I'd say software never really "caught up" to the general
| slowness that we had to endure in the HDD era either. Even
| my 14 year old desktop starts Word in a few seconds
| compared to upwards of 60s in the 90s.
|
| The closest I've seen is the shitty low end Samsung Android
| tablet we got for our kids. It's soooo slow and laggy. I
| suspect it's the storage. And that was actually and
| _upgrade_ over the Amazon Fire tablet we used to have which
| was so slow it was literally unusable. Again I suspect slow
| storage is the culprit.
| beastman82 wrote:
| Agree 100%. the compute was always bottlenecked by insanely
| high i/o latency. SSDs opened up fast computers like no
| processor ever did.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I mean, HDD were much faster than floppy disks. Which were in
| turn much faster than tape cassettes. And so on...
| lich_king wrote:
| Eh. In the 1980s and 1990s, the capabilities of the software
| you could run on your new computer were changing dramatically
| every two years or so. Completely new types of computer games
| and productivity software, vastly improved audio and video,
| more and more real-time functionality.
|
| Nowadays, you really don't get these magical moments when you
| upgrade, not on the device itself. The upgrade from Windows
| 10 to Windows 11 was basically just more ads. Games released
| today look about as good as games released 5-10 years ago.
| The music-making or photo-editing program you installed back
| then is still good. Your email works the same as before. In
| fact, I'm not sure I have a single program on my desktop that
| feels more capable or more responsive than it did in 2016.
|
| There's some magic with AI, but that's all in the cloud.
| rr808 wrote:
| I still remember my first CPU with a heatsink. It seemed like a
| temporary dumb hack.
| oso2k wrote:
| I had the same inclination back in the 90s when I upgraded my
| Cyrix 486 SLC2 50MHz without a heat sink (which seems like a
| no-no in retrospect) to Cyrix MediaGX 133MHz. The stocker fan
| was immediately noticeable. I thought I had done something
| wrong.
| myself248 wrote:
| Upgrading and Repairing PCs 4th edition even says directly,
| that some shady resellers will put a heatsink on a chip
| that they're running beyond spec, but that Intel designs
| all their processors to run at rated speed without one.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I've never seen a Xeon without a heat sink, I don't
| believe they are designed to run without one.
| rr808 wrote:
| The first Xeon looks to be released 1998, so sounds about
| right
| jasomill wrote:
| Indeed, even the oldest, slowest Xeons shipped in SECC
| cartridges with integrated heatsinks.
|
| But that was several years after the book cited by the GP
| was published (1994, shortly after the release of the
| original Pentium).
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Well it kinda was! seeing how power efficient iPhone chips
| are despite hovering the top of single core benchmarks.
| jmyeet wrote:
| That wasn't how it worked.
|
| Up until the 486, the clock speed and bus speed were basically
| the same and topped out at about 33MHz (IIRC). The 486 started
| the thing of making the CPU speed a multiple of the bus speed
| eg 486dx2/66 (33MHz CPU, 66MHz bus), 486dx4/100 (25MHz CPU,
| 100MHz bus). And that's continued to this day (kind of).
|
| But the point is the CPU became a lot faster than the IO speed,
| including memory. So these "overdrive" CPUs were faster but not
| 2-4x faster.
|
| Also, in terms of impact, yeah there was a massive incrase in
| performance through the 1990s but let's not forget the first
| consumer GPUs, namely 3dfx Voodoo and later NVidia and ATI. Oh,
| Matrox Millenium anyone?
|
| It's actually kind of wild that NVidia is now a trillion dollar
| company. It listed in 1998 for $12/share and adjusted for
| splits, Google is telling me it's ~3700x now.
| giantrobot wrote:
| You got your multipliers backwards with the 486dx. The
| multipliers was on the CPU core rather than the bus. A dx2
| was twice the memory bus speed. The dx4 was (confusingly)
| three times the bus speed. So a 486dx4/100 was a 33MHz bus
| with a 100MHz core.
| varispeed wrote:
| I don't know. I felt this way when switching from Intel laptop
| to Apple M1. I am still using it today and I prefer it over
| desktop PC.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Have you ever used proper desktop computers? I suppose such a
| move would feel significant if you've mostly been using
| laptops.
| philistine wrote:
| But that's the thing; a laptop is fundamentally different.
| Of course if there's the equivalent of a thermopump under
| my desk I'm going to get crazy performance. The magic was
| that Apple brought the uncompromised experience to a
| laptop.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The magic was that Apple brought the uncompromised
| experience to a laptop.
|
| Apple's power efficiency was a great bump forward, but
| the performance claims were a little exaggerated. I love
| my Apple Silicon devices but I still switch over to a
| desktop for GPU work because it's so much faster, for
| example.
|
| Apple had that famously misleading chart where they
| showed their M1 GPU keeping pace with a flagship nVidia
| card that misled everyone at launch. In practice they're
| not even close to flagship desktop accelerators,
| unfortunately.
|
| They have excellent idle power consumption though. Great
| for a laptop.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I also went from an Intel MacBook Pro to an M1 and
| appreciated it, but that leap was exaggerated by how bad the
| last few generations of Intel MacBook Pros were.
|
| The Apple Silicon chassis was allowed to finally house an
| appropriate cooling solution, too. They are much quieter than
| the same Intel laptops when dissipating the same power
| levels.
| nunez wrote:
| Agreed. That was the next big boost! I installed my first SSD
| in this HP workstation-grade laptop that we got "for free" from
| college. It was like getting a brand new computer! In fact, I
| ended up giving that computer to my sister who ran it into the
| ground.
|
| I didn't feel any huge speed boosts like that until the M1
| MacBook in 2020.
| pdpi wrote:
| I think the single biggest jump I ever experienced was my first
| dedicated GPU -- a GeForce 2 MX if I'm not mistaken.
| kwanbix wrote:
| My first pentium was clocked at 60Mhz.
| iwontberude wrote:
| I remember our school getting new computers to replace the
| 233Mhz G3 iMac computer lab during the Megahertz Wars and the
| vice principal announcing the purchase of new "screaming fast"
| 600 Mhz Dell Optiplex GX100. The nice thing is that the G3
| iMacs then got pushed out to the classrooms, but it was sad to
| see Apple lose the spot in the lab. I miss the wonder of
| playing Pangea Software games for the first time like Bugdom
| and Nanosaur.
| OldSchool wrote:
| When Alder Lake finally made a sizable jump, I looked at
| decades of old tests I'd done along the way with CPUs and tried
| to bridge them together reasonably.
|
| Between IPC (~50 to 100-fold improvement) and clock speed
| increases (1000-fold alone), I estimated that single-thread
| performance has increased on the order of 50,000x - 100,000x
| since the 4.77 MHz 8088.
|
| In human terms this is like one minute compared to one month!
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Argh. The headline. The opener. Awful. Where are editors in 2026?
| There's no way an LLM would write this.
|
| The GHz barrier wasn't special. What was much more important was
| the fact that AMD was giving Intel a hard time and there was
| finally hard competition.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| There was a time where increased clock speeds, or more
| generally increased processor throughput was important. I can
| remember when computers were slow, even for things like
| browsing the web (and not just because internet connection
| speeds were slow), and paying more for a new faster computer
| made sense. I think this time period may well have lasted
| roughly until the "GHz era" or thereabouts, after which even
| the cheapest, slowest, computers were all that anybody really
| needed, except for gamers where the the solution was a faster
| graphics card (which eventually lead to GPU-computing and the
| current AI revolution!)
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| You're conflating a few things here. The Vista era was the
| biggest requirement hit. That was the time where people
| really needed a faster PC to continue browsing. Before that,
| you could get away with XP running on a sub-GHz processor.
| tosti wrote:
| That's not how I remember recent history because Linux was
| already pretty good before microslop XP came out. I've been
| daily driving cheap junk ever since, no regrets.
| adrian_b wrote:
| In terms of marketing, the "GHz" barrier was special, because
| surpassing it has indeed created a lot of recognition in the
| general public for the fact that the AMD Athlon CPUs were
| better than the Intel Pentium III CPUs.
|
| In reality, of course what you say is true and the fact that
| Athlon could previde a few extra hundreds of MHz in the clock
| frequency was not decisive.
|
| Athlon had many improvements in microarchitecture in comparison
| with Pentium III, which ensured a much better performance even
| at equal clock frequency. For instance, Athlon was the first
| x86 CPU that was able to do both a floating-point
| multiplication and a floating-point addition in a single clock
| cycle. Pentium III, like all previous Intel Pentium CPUs
| required 2 clock cycles for this pair of operations.
|
| This much better floating-point performance of Athlon vs. Intel
| contrasted with the previous generation, where AMD K6 had
| competitive integer performance with Intel, but its floating-
| point performance was well below that of the various Intel
| Pentium models (which had hurt its performance in some games).
| dlcarrier wrote:
| AMD being competitive at the time is what mattered, but there's
| still technological advancement needed for them to be
| competitive. In this case, it was AMD using copper
| interconnects that allowed them to not only hit 1 GHz, but
| quickly clock up from there:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon#Original_release
| hedora wrote:
| The Athlon XP was the bigger milestone, as I remember it.
|
| They were both "seventh generation" according to their marketing,
| but you could get an entire GHz+ Athlon XP machine for much less
| than half the $990 tray price from the article.
|
| I distinctly remember the day work bought a 5 or 6 node cluster
| for $2000. (A local computer shop gave us a bulk discount and
| assembled it for them, so sadly, I didn't poke around inside the
| boxes much.)
|
| We had a Solaris workstation that retailed for $10K in the same
| office. Its per-core speed was comparable to one Athlon machine,
| so the cluster ran circles around it for our workload.
|
| Intel was completely missing in action at that point, despite
| being the market leader. They were about to release the Pentium
| 4, and didn't put anything decent out from then to the Core 2
| Duo. (The Pentium 4 had high clock rates, but low instructions
| per cycle, so it didn't really matter. Then AMD beat Intel to
| market with 64 bit support.)
|
| I suspect history is in the process of repeating itself. My $550
| AMD box happily runs Qwen 3.5 (32B parameters). An nvidia board
| that can run that costs > 4x as much.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| The article links to a list of "The five greatest AMD CPUs".
| I've owned two and a half of these! Athlon XP 1800+, Ryzen 7
| 1700 (I had the 1800X which was just a higher bin of the same
| chip), and Ryzen 9 3950X.
|
| That same article also says that extending x86 to 64 bits
| "wasn't hard", which I'm not so sure about. There are plenty of
| mistakes AMD could have made and cleanups they could have
| missed, but they handled it all quite well AFAICS.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Next up AI 395+. I love this thing. Sips power!
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I got one of these in a laptop. For a laptop, not really,
| especially in idle (6-7 watts for the whole laptop). It's
| quite good anyway.
| davidee wrote:
| I have very fond memories of my first dual-cpu Athlon machine.
|
| It was the workstation on which I learned Logic Audio before, you
| know, Apple bought Emagic. I took that machine, running very low
| latency Reason to live gigs with my band.
|
| Carting around a full-tower computer (not to mention the large
| CRT monitor we needed) next to a bunch of tube Fender & Ampeg
| amps was wild at the time. Finding a good drummer was hard; we
| turned that challenge into a lot of fun programming rhythm
| sections we could jam to, and control in real-time, live.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| My first 1GHz was an AMD, also my first non-Intel, and its
| required fan was so loud that I was glad to get rid of it.
|
| The speed was nice, and some competition helped lower prices.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| I remember upgrading my 486 DX2 66Mhz to a DX4 100Mhz and all of
| a sudden being able to run winamp and Quake. That felt pretty
| epic at the time.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I have a hard time remembering what computers I had in the 1990s
| now. I had an 8086 in the 1980s. I think the next one I had was a
| 486/33 in the early 90s and I had this for years. I remember
| having a Cyrix 586 at some point later. I think the next jump was
| in the early 2000s and I honestly don't rmeember what that CPU
| was so I can't say when I got my first 1GHz+ CPU. Probably that
| 2002 PC. No idea what it was now. But it did survive in some form
| for another 12 years.
|
| Fun fact #1: many today may not know that the only reason
| switched to the Pentium name was because a court ruled that they
| couldn't trademark a number and AMD had cross-licensed the
| microarchitecture and instruction set to AMD and Cyrix.
|
| It was the Pentium 4 when clock speeds went insane and became a
| huge marketing point even though Pentium chips had lower IPC than
| Athlons (at that time). There was a belief that CPUs would keep
| going to 10GHz+. Instead they hit a ceiling at about ~3GHz,
| that's barely increased to this day (ignoring burst modes).
|
| Intel originally intended to move workstations and servers to the
| EPIC architecture (eg Merced was an early chip in this series).
| This began in the 1990s but was years delayed and required
| writing software a very particular way. It never delievered on
| its promise.
|
| And AMD, thanks to the earlier cross-licensing agreement, just
| ate Intel's lunch with the Athlon 64 starting in 2003 by adding
| the x86_64 instructions, which we still use today.
|
| Fun Fact #2: it was the Pentium 3 that saved Intel's hide long
| after it was discontinued in favor of the Pentium 4.
|
| The early 2000s were the nascent era of multi-core CPUs. The
| Pentium 3 had survived in mobile chips and become the Pentium-M
| and then the Core Duo (and Core 2 Duo later). This was the
| Centrino platform and included wireless (IIRC 802.11b/g). The
| Pentium 4 hit the Gigahertz ceiling and EPIC wasn't going to
| happen to Intel went back to the drawing board, revived the
| mobile Pentium-3 platform, adding AMD's 64 bit instructions and
| released their desktop CPUs. Even modern Intel CPUs are in many
| ways a derivation of the Pentium-3 [1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors
| random3 wrote:
| Fun times. Coolers, paste, fans, supply watts, dip switches and
| jumpers. Quake, Voodoo 3dfx vs NVidia GForce. This is where it
| all started, kids.
|
| I was in high school and was running a "computer games club" (~
| Internet cafe for games and kids) since 1998 when we got a place,
| renovated it ourselves, got custom built furniture (cheap narrow
| desks) and initially 6 computers - AMDs at 300Mhz. By 2000 we
| broke a wall in the adjacent space and had ~15, cable + satellite
| internet for downloads and whatever video cards we could buy or
| scrap. It was wild.
| nikanj wrote:
| Finding high school kids with a similar "tech" background today
| seems really hard. Tech users, sure, chronic phone / game
| addicts are everywhere, but that tweaker spirit is rare
| Razengan wrote:
| > _This is where it all started, kids._
|
| Nah.. Cassettes, computers-in-a-keyboard, booting straight into
| BASIC.. THIS is where it all started, grandkids.
| random3 wrote:
| Hahaha! True. I was pointing out the beginnings of modern
| GPUs and NVidia, but yes heard the cassette screeching before
| the modem screeching indeed.
| ehnto wrote:
| I bought a whole bunch of parts with my first Athlon. I think I
| bought a Soundblaster, and a Radeon GFX card if I am remembering
| the timeline right. The soundblaster came with a demo of a Lara
| Croft game that used the then incredible spatial audio processing
| to great effect. The industry promptly forgot about that
| technology, and to this day game audio rarely matches the
| potential of real time spatial dynamics that we once reached 20
| years ago.
| phil21 wrote:
| Spatial audio is pretty good these days on some titles. It's
| just most folks don't have a sound system that can really do
| much with it. Headphones can only do so much in this arena.
|
| Couple a modern AAA title (like Battlefield 6, etc.) with a
| proper Atmos sound system and you will likely be pretty amazed.
| Even a simple 5.1 setup is pretty decent for hearing footsteps
| behind you/etc. which actually does help with gameplay.
|
| I haven't kept up on it as my computer gaming area doesn't lend
| itself towards a proper speaker setup these days, but playing
| with headphones on lately has made me start to look into this
| again. I need to find some high quality tiny cube speakers or
| something to be able to put in weird spots on the
| ceilings/walls.
| fleventynine wrote:
| I upgraded to this exact CPU from a 200MHz pentium in the fall of
| 2000. Easily the largest jump in performance of any upgrade I've
| ever done.
| nikanj wrote:
| The craziest thing is, I don't actually know how many gigahertz
| either my PC or my macbook are. The megahertz race used to
| fierce!
| myself248 wrote:
| It's essentially random at any given moment. If I peek, mine
| will say it's running anywhere between 700MHz and 3.4GHz.
| Sometimes I think it goes even faster, but only if it's weirdly
| cold at the time.
| nunez wrote:
| What a time to be a kid then.
|
| We had a hand-me-down DEC x86 desktop at home with a Pentium II
| running at 233 MHz until I want to say 2002? This was around the
| time I learned how to build a PC since doing that was cheaper
| than buying one and no-one in my family had the money for that!
|
| I saved whatever money I could to buy a 128MB stick of RAM from
| Staples (maybe it was 256MB?), a few other things from
| TigerDirect/Newegg and _this processor_. With some help from my
| uncle and a guide I printed from somewhere whose website started
| with '3D' (it was quite popular back then; I don't think it
| exists anymore), I got it done.
|
| Going from 233 MHz to this was like going from walking to flying
| in a jet! Everything was SO MUCH F**ING FASTER. Windows XP
| _flew_. (The DEC barely made the minimum requirements for it, and
| boy did I feel it.) Trying to install Longhorn on it a year or
| two later brought me back into walking again, though. :D
| general_reveal wrote:
| GeForce 3.
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| My first pc I built was with an AMD athlon 64 4000+ and a
| GeForce 6600GT. Going to that from an e-machines piece of junk
| was INSANE. It's so hard to come up with a similar experience
| shift nowadays. Even websites seemed to load instantly with the
| same DSL connection. Everything felt soooooo good.
| crims0n wrote:
| You reminded me that building use to be _considerably_ cheaper
| than buying.
|
| I remember my teen years, doing odd jobs to get some cash,
| buying a part at a time until the build was complete. Worrying
| that if you didn't scrap together enough parts soon there may
| be an architecture change. Finally getting it all together and
| the feeling of pure bliss installing the OS, troubleshooting
| drivers, installing this or that. Good times.
| Twirrim wrote:
| I had a similar speed jump, went from a Celeron 233 to the
| Athlon 1Ghz. Such a huge uplift.
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