6 Jun
2013
6 Jun
'13
5:53 a.m.
On Thu, Jun 06, 2013 at 06:10:56AM -0400, Jason Howe wrote:
[...]
At the time I generally found the PII and early PIII
chips to be uninspired
and a waste of money. It always like they should have felt faster than they
did. I stuck with my 200 Mhz PI Desktop for a really long time, until the
socket 370 PIII's came out.
I didn't use the PII and PIII until people were practically giving them away,
so around 2004. They were at least faster and more stable than the ratty old
AMD and Cyrix boxes they replaced.
Now, if you want to talk about a processor not to
trust, anything based on
Intel's NetBurst architecture...
Oh indeed. In the words of Sir Humphrey Appleby, going for such a long
execution pipeline in an era where RAM was not getting any faster was a
courageous move.
That particular stumble by Intel gave AMD enough of a competitive advantage
that we have x86-64 now, which has a much nicer instruction set than the plain
x86. Otherwise we might have ended up with Itanic dominating 64 bit computing.
But then Intel redeemed themselves by making the Core series of processors,
saving us from cheap and nasty AMD chipsets. So we got the best of both worlds!
(I'm quite pleased with the performance and stability of my current i5 system.)