Intel's 15 Most Unforgettable x86 CPUs

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[citation][nom]johnlove[/nom]Compared to Athlon, Pentium 4 is a big loser. So why is the Pentium 4 "unforgettable"?[/citation]
I'm guessing because everyone remembered them as running hot and slow in comparison to the Athlon XP's at the time.

Lol at 68 pin and 3,000 nanometer processes. That's crazy. Those were the days eh?
 
AMD actually released a 1-GHz microprocessor first.

Reference:
"INTEL WILL LAUNCH a 1-GHz Pentium III processor on Wednesday, a source close to the company said Monday, two days after arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) released an Athlon processor running at the same speed."
(March 6, 2000)
-http://www.x86.org/news/2000/news030500.htm
 
The Pentium bug was easy to reproduce. Create a division operation when equaled 12.5% (or 1/8) and it returned zero instead.
 
[citation][nom]fleakiller[/nom]Man i am old i remember all of them and had most of them[/citation]

i know what you mean.. i had all of 'em but the 8086 - my first was an 8088 running DOS 2.11. lol 10 meg partition limit ftw!
 
Rambus RDRAM was introduced with Slot 1 P!!!s starting with the 820 and 840 chipset motherboards (I built several 'VC820' rigs and still have several '2p' OR840 workstations). The 850 chipset was the only P4 desktop with Rambus that I can recall.

There were, however, Pentium 4 Xeon server/workstation motherboards that continued the use of Rambus memory (860 chipsets?) that introduced (IIRC) the infamous marketing term, Netburst.
 
Hehe my first pc was the 286 victor, with 25mhz and 2-3mb ram. Was windows 3,1 and dosshell. Used it most to play my fav game, and is one my fav game still. Civilzation 1 😛 this game i have at least given 1year of my live of playtime :)
 
Intel doesn't have ANY quad core CPU's, they're called duo-duo cores.

I would have also liked to see more notes about how AMD was doing (who beat who to 1GHz, dual cores, 64-bit, etc).

A decent article nonetheless.
 
[citation][nom]johnlove[/nom]Compared to Athlon, Pentium 4 is a big loser. So why is the Pentium 4 "unforgettable"?[/citation]
who could forget how....warm...it was! why, i still like to fire up my old northie in the winter...keeps me toasty, and saves on my gas bill!
 
[citation][nom]dario77[/nom]who could forget how....warm...it was! why, i still like to fire up my old northie in the winter...keeps me toasty, and saves on my gas bill![/citation]
My C2D / X2 are too cold that I have to turn the heat up in winter.
 
Nice Article, I love looking back. Cant wait for the AMD story.


Typing this on a 1.2 ghz Tualatin, still in use 6 years later. It seems Dell used some in their desktops.
 
Ok, let me get this straight. The Pentium 4 came out in 2000 and sucked. AMD was kicking Intell's butt from 2000 until 2006 when the Core 2 duo's came out.......and AMD barely gained any ground on Intell during those 6 years.....hmmmm I wonder why....could it be that Intell was not playing fair.......

 
[citation][nom]SkeptiCoder[/nom]An article listing 5 would have been more fitting, it wouldn't have seemed like a veiled advertisement for Intel.[/citation]
If it were an ad, why would they have similar articles published or in the pipe for all the other major companies? Maybe all the others are really "veiled advertisments" for TSMC? /conspiracy
 
everyone seems to forget late 2002 when pentium 4 northwood hit 3.06GHz with HT and was killing the athlon xp in almost everything. early 2003 intel came out with the 800mhz bus pentium 4 northwoods with dual channel ddr400 and killed the athlon xp even more. then in september of 2003 the athlon 64 launched and then amd was on top again. AMD lost the lead from late 2002 until late 2003 pretty badly. Not all pentium 4's were bad performers as everyone seems to think.

Either way it was more like a list of all intel chips from the 80's till now, not so much highlights but i enjoyed reading it anyway.
 
Great article. Brings back some memories.

I started with a $3500 8088 based NCR computer. Big bucks for extra options like the "Turbo" button....labeled XP for extra performance, 640KB RAM instead of 512KB, and 30MB hard drive (instead of 20MB or no hard drive at all). Also spent big bucks for a 3.5" floppy in addition to the 5.25". I'm thinking that first box of 10 3.5" disks we bought was something like $40 or $50. The XP button was great. It bumped the CPU from 4.77 Mhz to 8 Mhz. Games were text based then, and pressing the switch directly impacted the speed at which the interface to the game ran. It was always nice to press that button to speed through slow spots in the game.

Next was a 386 DX 40. The article says 16-33 Mhz for 386, but they did come out with a 40 Mhz at the end of the generation.

Then I went to college. My Dad then went on to a Pentium Pro 200. All I can say is WOW. That thing was incredible for performance. It was big cash to bypass the Pentium, but it was worth it.

Me, being the poor college type, went to a Pentium 60, then to a Pentium 200 MMX, then PII 400, AMD Athlon XP 2500, and then to my current Core 2 Duo.

 
'Scuse me, but did we forget something?

Am I the only one who remembers the 80186?
 
I am happy since the only Intel CPU I have never bought was P4 series, instead I went to Barton overclocked. Well I am good at choosing CPU's. Lots of memories about great SCSI and PCI devices... I'm still having it but can't use it with new MOBO. ;(
 
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