Discussion CPU Chronicles - The Time of Memories?

[jnjnilson6]

Would you gladly venture down memory lane and surreptitiously be met with 8086 processors; or go down to the vogue of 386 and 486 CPUs?

Would you go ahead quite some and be met with Pentium 4s and the like?

What about those Core 2 Duo days? What about the days of first gen. i7s?

Throughout the exuberant, beauty-clad past, saturated and poignant within our minds, what would be the times you would most like to revisit? What do you associate them with? Do you regard ceaseless hours spent playing innumerable games or developing software or crafting intriguing animation? Where would you like to point those morsels of beauty to?

Sitting in front of a computer has been a breathless experience, hashed here and there by sunlight or the vividness of breathing evening hours, meant to spark that intrigue indefinitely within the memory...

Do tell part of your story; the most vivid part!

Thank you! 😉

 

[Order 66]

I am afraid I was too young to remember these CPUs, although it sounds like it was a great time. I would like to know what made the first gen i7s so great?

 

[jnjnilson6]

I am afraid I was too young to remember these CPUs, although it sounds like it was a great time. I would like to know what made the first gen i7s so great?

Well, they came about in 2008 when many people were still using Pentium 4s and at a time Pentium 4s still felt strong (for everything except games like Crysis). Pentium 4 HTs had 1 core and 2 threads. They were the first processors to utilize Hyper-Threading. Core 2 Quads had 4 cores; some Core 2 Extremes had 2 cores, others had 4. And those processors were considered incredibly powerful back then. And then came along processors like the Core i7-920 - harboring 4 cores and 8 threads and nearly hitting 3 GHz. That would be about November 2008; the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition reached 3.46 GHz and was released the same month. Now that was at a time single core Pentium 4s at speeds over 3.2 GHz were considered fast and good; now imagine having a brilliantly more productive architecture and retaining 4 cores and 8 threads (which would make 8 cores) and running at such speeds... It was such a miraculous jump I am afraid we shall not witness again very soon. Those CPUs would be good for gaming and the most demanding tasks for many years; they provided a vivid example of the beauty and power of hardware the same way the Crysis games provided a vivid example of the beauty and ingenuity of software. They were times of incalculable glory; remorselessly suffusing the minds of gamers and software engineers, partaking within the final breath of ingenuity by frames heightened and surreal - endlessly unrecapturable accomplishments...

 

[Ralston18]

No technical questions or problems herein.

Moving thread to Opinions and Experiences.

 

[Order 66]

Well, they came about in 2008 when many people were still using Pentium 4s and at a time Pentium 4s still felt strong (for everything except games like Crysis). Pentium 4 HTs had 1 core and 2 threads. They were the first processors to utilize Hyper-Threading. Core 2 Quads had 4 cores; some Core 2 Extremes had 2 cores, others had 4. And those processors were considered incredibly powerful back then. And then came along processors like the Core i7-920 - harboring 4 cores and 8 threads and nearly hitting 3 GHz. That would be about November 2008; the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition reached 3.46 GHz and was released the same month. Now that was at a time single core Pentium 4s at speeds over 3.2 GHz were considered fast and good; now imagine having a brilliantly more productive architecture and retaining 4 cores and 8 threads (which would make 8 cores) and running at such speeds... It was such a miraculous jump I am afraid we shall not witness again very soon. Those CPUs would be good for gaming and the most demanding tasks for many years; they provided a vivid example of the beauty and power of hardware the same way the Crysis games provided a vivid example of the beauty and ingenuity of software. They were times of incalculable glory; remorselessly suffusing the minds of gamers and software engineers, partaking within the final breath of ingenuity by frames heightened and surreal - endlessly unrecapturable accomplishments...

I didn't realize that the first gen i7s had triple-channel memory. They may be the only consumer CPUs to have it, other than Xeons of course.

 

[jnjnilson6]

I didn't realize that the first gen i7s had triple-channel memory. They may be the only consumer CPUs to have it, other than Xeons of course.

That's intriguing to note indeed...

An interesting point would be that some laptops said to support 16 GB RAM (2x 8 GB sticks) do fully support 64 GB (2x 32 GB) - but nobody actually says that, despite it is true (on a number of machines from personal experience).

I've had an ASUS motherboard in the Pentium 4 days meant for Pentium 4 CPUs which had a lot of memory slots; either 6 or 8. You could probably install 8 GB RAM and if you had a x64 Pentium 4 it would work fine with it. Despite, of course, those were the Windows XP days and Windows XP was majorly in its x32 variant meaning it could support up to 4 GB RAM. Back then 1 GB RAM was what 32 GB RAM are today.

It is funny how, having 48 GB RAM today on my laptop, my memory usage percentage-wise is the same as it had been in 2010 with 4 GB RAM. The tasks I perform today and the applications I use pertain of the same amount of memory (percentage-wise) as the same tasks did back 13 years ago when I had 4 GB of RAM. For example, exertions (like opening many, but not too many tabs in Chrome) which used 1 GB of RAM in 2010 in their exact same type and amount would end up using 12 GB on my machine today; that's about 25% of my entire memory capacity in both cases.

So we may say that a man with 48 GB of RAM today would be the same man with 4 GB of RAM 13 years before.

 

[Order 66]

That's intriguing to note indeed...

An interesting point would be that some laptops said to support 16 GB RAM (2x 8 GB sticks) do fully support 64 GB (2x 32 GB) - but nobody actually says that, despite it is true (on a number of machines from personal experience).

I've had an ASUS motherboard in the Pentium 4 days meant for Pentium 4 CPUs which had a lot of memory slots; either 6 or 8. You could probably install 8 GB RAM and if you had a x64 Pentium 4 it would work fine with it. Despite, of course, those were the Windows XP days and Windows XP was majorly in its x32 variant meaning it could support up to 4 GB RAM. Back then 1 GB RAM was what 32 GB RAM are today.

It is funny how, having 48 GB RAM today on my laptop, my memory usage percentage-wise is the same as it had been in 2010 with 4 GB RAM. The tasks I perform today and the applications I use pertain of the same amount of memory (percentage-wise) as the same tasks did back 13 years ago when I had 4 GB of RAM. For example, exertions (like opening many, but not too many tabs in Chrome) which used 1 GB of RAM in 2010 in their exact same type and amount would end up using 12 GB on my machine today; that's about 25% of my entire memory capacity in both cases.

So we may say that a man with 48 GB of RAM today would be the same man with 4 GB of RAM 13 years before.

I feel like, past a certain point, the number of Chrome tabs you can have open becomes impractical. I do like asking the question of how many Chrome tabs can I fit in a certain amount of RAM. I remember an LTT video where they had 2TB of RAM and I think they were able to open thousands of Chrome tabs. I think they were limited to specific Xeon CPUs, because IIRC only certain Xeon CPUs could support that much RAM. The strange thing was, that "only" 200GB out of the 2000 were used because the rest of the system was the limiting factor. I didn't even know windows supported 2TB of RAM.

 

[hotaru.hino]

So we may say that a man with 48 GB of RAM today would be the same man with 4 GB of RAM 13 years before.

Nah, not really. 4GB of RAM in 2010 is more like 8GB now. 8GB of RAM would've been around 16GB now. Though this is based on some screenshots I have of my desktop way back when and it was showing somewhere around 1.7/6GB used on Windows 7, with Firefox open (probably a few tabs), two IM apps, Steam, and Winamp. Considering Windows tends to scale memory usage with available RAM, that figure will go down if less was installed (indeed, I have screen caps of my Vista desktop and they were under 1GB out of 2GB).

Memory management in OSes I'm led to believe tends to be "be more generous the more is available", because 1. unused RAM is wasted RAM and 2. allocating memory is expensive, so allocate more than necessary to avoid doing it again.

 

[Fantastical]

I had informatics lessons in the school and the "best" part of that school was that there wasn't any single computer to learn something and we was playing cards with teacher on that lessons 🤣

First computers i had interacted with was 478 socket, I do not remember what model it was but i remember i did burn twice my big brothers pc when i was kid 🤣 mainly i was opening case and looking inside touching things (touching is good 🤣 ) and in good situations we had some removed cables on something like that in result and in worst scenario it was dead at all 🤣

my own pc first i brought in the end of 2009, it was
MB: asus - p5kpl-am se
CPU: core 2 duo e7500
RAM: 4gb ddr2 800mhz
GPU: GT 9600 512mb....
it was 31 January when i bring it in home and that was my first new year which i meet with computer 🤣