Intel's 15 Most Unforgettable x86 CPUs

[Otaku]

[citation][nom]Brutuz1000and1[/nom]Erm, you say "The Pentium III Coppermine was the first commercial x86 processor from Intel to attain a clock speed of 1 GHz"Wasn't the Athlon the first to Break 1Ghz?Maybe you meant "The Pentium III was the first Intel processor to break 1 GFLOPS, with a theoretical performance of 2 GFLOPS."[/citation]


Read again "the first commercial x86 processor from Intel". I've never seen an Intel Athlon

 

[Guest]

Well, I guess there wasn't a CPU made by Intel that wasn't forgettable. I'm pretty sure they discussed every generation. Lame title guys.

 

[fujiwarabunta]

How could you forget the brilliant Celeron 300A!?
That's the only intel CPU I really like.
Why? It's AMD priced... and it's AMD overclockable from 300Mhz to 464Mhz Stable... ON AIR and It still works today.
This is a 8year working Non-Stop, over 50% plus Overclock, AirCooled Intel LowCost CPU. It must be the ABSOLUTE WINNER.
It's the LESS INTEL, more AMD like cpu i've ever seen and by far the one i respect the most.
Had Intel done that more often and maybe today i had majority Intel cpu's at home instead of only 2 against 8AMD's.

 

[OldeFortran]

[citation][nom]fujiwarabunta[/nom]How could you forget the brilliant Celeron 300A!?That's the only intel CPU I really like. Why? It's AMD priced... and it's AMD overclockable from 300Mhz to 464Mhz Stable... ON AIR and It still works today. This is a 8year working Non-Stop, over 50% plus Overclock, AirCooled Intel LowCost CPU. It must be the ABSOLUTE WINNER. It's the LESS INTEL, more AMD like cpu i've ever seen and by far the one i respect the most. Had Intel done that more often and maybe today i had majority Intel cpu's at home instead of only 2 against 8AMD's.[/citation]

That is exactly what I was thinking! The 300A is what pulled me, and many of my friends, into the crazy world of overclocking. I still remember all of my EE friends in college barking about electron migration, and how my CPU would fail at any moment. That sucker ran for over 4 years, until the PSU crapped the bed and took everything down with it. Good times....

 

[mitch074]

A little mistake, some missing data, and an information...
- 386DX were actually the first processors to have L2 cache: a 386DX20 sold in an Amstrad could be found with 64K of L2 cache; the 386LX was a SX with support for the HLT instruction (stop CPU on idle).
- the 286 was interesting because, due to a bug, you could re-route a part of the BIOS address range to RAM, allowing you to keep some code in the executable memory range (and go past the 640 Kb barrier); this came to be called "high memory", and was used to host device drivers like mouse, VESA.
- the Pentium, not in charge of its L2 cache, relied upon the chipset to manage cache and memory; the most efficient Intel chipset was the 430TX (it supported FPM DRAM, EDO DRAM and SDRAM, and USB), which couldn't cache memory addresses above 64 Mb. You could install more than 64 Mb, but performance would degrade greatly.
- The Celeron 300A overclocked reliably, but more than anything when doing so it outperformed Intel's then-top Pentium II 450 MHz, which ran with a 4x bigger but half-speed L2 cache making the 300A@450 better for 3D games (which enjoyed low latency over size) especially when combined with the 440BX's stellar efficiency memory-wise and some low-latency SDRAM.

 

[Guest]

I remember the day my dad brought home 4 new computers (he is owner of 7 companies) I might be wrong but the PowerPC G3 not yet the iMac was a tan PowerMac G3 soon to be the AMD & Intel eating PowerMac G3 Blue, PowerMac G4 & P4 AMD 64 killing PowerMac G5 Duel & Quad Core true 64bit. That said I am typing to you on a Mac Pro 2.1 with 2 Quad Core Intel Xenon's for 8 cores it I have to admit is faster 70% of the time then my PowerMac G5 Quad that I love.

 

[cadder]

For the upcoming story, or a followup story, please include CPU's by other manufacturers such as Cyrix.

 

[Groza Adrian]

Might want to reconsider the pentium 4 table,neither the northwood nor the williamette had SSE2.