Discussion Pentium 4s Were Fast. Core i7s Are Not.

[jnjnilson6]

Software.

I remember back in the day 1 GB RAM (around 2005) could load programs / do as much almost as 48 - 64 GB can do today.
Many programs are written badly and it seems that my Core i7-12700H performs simple tasks like web browsing even a little slower than a P4 would in the past.

In the past computers were infinitely slow and software was well written. Today computers are infinitely fast and software is badly written. If this trend continues soon simple tasks would not be able to be executed well at all even on the most powerful of modern hardware.

Do write up your thoughts and
Thank you!

 

[kira-faye]

I think you're looking at the P4 through rose tinted glasses. The Internet (and everything else) was much less complex. Sure it may have been "faster" but it was doing less.

 

[jnjnilson6]

I think you're looking at the P4 through rose tinted glasses. The Internet (and everything else) was much less complex. Sure it may have been "faster" but it was doing less.

Thank you for writing up!

I remember the breathless P4 logo while the machine booted up before the Windows XP logo came up. You felt a sensation of power not to be duplicated ever again in the future.
I remember around 2011 I could load up to 40 tabs in Chrome and have PowerPoint opened on 896 MB RAM and a Sempron 3300+ (1 core / 2 GHz) and everything ran smoothly. And that was even slower than what a Pentium 4 HT @ 2.8 GHz could provide.

An old video I'd made.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PbLRWC9pPA


The P4 here does better at 1080p (lower CPU usage) than many current high-end processors would.

 

[USAFRet]

Software.

I remember back in the day 1 GB RAM (around 2005) could load programs / do as much almost as 48 - 64 GB can do today.
Many programs are written badly and it seems that my Core i7-12700H performs simple tasks like web browsing even a little slower than a P4 would in the past.

In the past computers were infinitely slow and software was well written. Today computers are infinitely fast and software is badly written. If this trend continues soon simple tasks would not be able to be executed well at all even on the most powerful of modern hardware.

Do write up your thoughts and
Thank you!

Now....take a 2005 or earlier system, and connect to a current website.
With all of its ads, or ad blockers.

Or play any game.

Or any photo/video/CAD manipulation.

Your Pentium PIV would cry.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Now....take a 2005 or earlier system, and connect to a current website.
With all of its ads, or ad blockers.

Or play any game.

Or any photo/video/CAD manipulation.

Your Pentium PIV would cry.

Of course it would. The point is though that software could still be written in a way in which even an Intel Atom could run simple tasks finely today. Most programmers write for money. Sure there are big minds but they are not enough. Too many people doing the same thing with most of them not understanding completely what they are doing. It's like asking 1000 people to jointly draw the Mona Lisa or write a great novel. In the end it would not be pretty.

The greatest software would always be conceived by single minds. Too bad emphasis is not put on quality and strength as much as it should be anymore, although it cannot be. And it cannot be because the programmers working do not retain that big view and knowledge to make breakthrough optimizations and infallible structures. There are programmers which can do this; but they are very few.

 

[Eximo]

Straight up HTML doesn't take a whole lot to run. When they started at adding client side java script and graphics/effects we started to have problems. Then they started doing full, sometimes multiple, full video ads. Just imagine the sheer volume of information a modern website sends and receives on the client side. There is a reason we don't use 10Mbps NICs anymore, let alone 56Kbps modem.

2GB memory usage on Chrome right now for me. I didn't have 2GB of memory until the Athlon X2, and that was a high end system of its day. My computer prior to that had 512MB I think, maybe 1GB?

That was what prompted upgrades to my HTPC/Browsing computer. AMD E350 was fine for desktop use, but the normal internet, video playback crushed its little low power dual core. Then my i3-4130T struggled to load weather.com. So I put my old 4770k in there.

 

[TerryLaze]

I remember around 2011 I could load up to 40 tabs in Chrome and have PowerPoint opened on 896 MB RAM and a Sempron 3300+ (1 core / 2 GHz) and everything ran smoothly. And that was even slower than what a Pentium 4 HT @ 2.8 GHz could provide.

The height of flash adds on every webpage, many times multiple of them?! At a time where there was no hardware acceleration for webpages, or even if there was pentiums didn't have any? Yeah but no, 2011 was hell for any pentium.
It's just that your brain adapts to the speed over time and makes it look normal.

 

[USAFRet]

Of course it would. The point is though that software could still be written in a way in which even an Intel Atom could run simple tasks finely today. Most programmers write for money. Sure there are big minds but they are not enough. Too many people doing the same thing with most of them not understanding completely what they are doing. It's like asking 1000 people to jointly draw the Mona Lisa or write a great novel. In the end it would not be pretty.

The greatest software would always be conceived by single minds. Too bad emphasis is not put on quality and strength as much as it should be anymore, although it cannot be. And it cannot be because the programmers working do not retain that big view and knowledge to make breakthrough optimizations and infallible structures. There are programmers which can do this; but they are very few.

Simple tasks, yes, maybe.

But.....

I have a couple of low end Asus Transformer laptops, with Atom procs. 2 or 4GB RAM. Win 10.
2016-2018 vintage.

They are disastrously slow, at even simple tasks.
Slow to the point of almost unusable, especially the 2GB version.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Straight up HTML doesn't take a whole lot to run. When they started at adding client side java script and graphics/effects we started to have problems. Then they started doing full, sometimes multiple, full video ads. Just imagine the sheer volume of information a modern website sends and receives on the client side. There is a reason we don't use 10Mbps NICs anymore, let alone 56Kbps modem.

2GB memory usage on Chrome right now for me. I didn't have 2GB of memory until the Athlon X2, and that was a high end system of its day. My computer prior to that had 512MB I think, maybe 1GB?

That was what prompted upgrades to my HTPC/Browsing computer. AMD E350 was fine for desktop use, but the normal internet, video playback crushed its little low power dual core. Then my i3-4130T struggled to load weather.com. So I put my old 4770k in there.

How's the 4770K? Had a 3770K myself (watercooled - Corsair H110) and was able to overclock it to 5 GHz. And it performed a little faster than an i7-3930K stock at that speed. It was a great CPU for its time.

Today the barrier is exactly between 2 core / 4 thread CPUs and 4 core / 8 thread CPUs. The former configuration being unthinkably slow and the latter running quite well.

 

[bill001g]

It is not necessarily the programmers they might know how to do thing efficiently it is the corporate bosses that want them to pack the code with ads and tracking garbage. My machine runs so much better with ad and script blockers. There are pages I have found the run scripts that constantly update a ad windows even if you are sitting doing nothing. They would load more data than I do looking for what I want.
I still have issues trying to block some sites that autoplay video.

 

[punkncat]

Think of pages like Geocities as compared to social media sites. Consider the speed of dial up vs broadband. I agree that you have your rose glasses on.

 

[Eximo]

How's the 4770K? Had a 3770K myself (watercooled - Corsair H110) and was able to overclock it to 5 GHz. And it performed a little faster than an i7-3930K stock at that speed. It was a great CPU for its time.

Today the barrier is exactly between 2 core / 4 thread CPUs and 4 core / 8 thread CPUs. The former configuration being unthinkably slow and the latter running quite well.

It was still getting the job done. I also underclocked it to 3Ghz to keep it quiet, I just needed more than two cores really, and I bumped it up to 16GB. I replaced it with an i3-12100F (32GB) last year so I could switch to an NVMe drive and get ReBar for my A380, for no reason but to mess with it.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Think of pages like Geocities as compared to social media sites. Consider the speed of dial up vs broadband. I agree that you have your rose glasses on.

A Pentium M 1.6 GHz or a Pentium 4 (even a 2.66 GHz one without HT) would boot up Windows XP and perform faster on a HDD back in the day than a Core i3-8130U would boot up Windows 11 Pro on a Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB and perform within today.

Otherwise you're right about the rose glasses aspect. Memories are always sweeter in the end; especially indulging them gaudily into the nocturnal hour, thinking of gone ventures in the hardware world...

 

[USAFRet]

Ray tracing a scene...

Late 90's (486), early 2000s (P4), ray tracing a single semi complex scene with a P4 would take hours, or overnight.

Today...pretty much rendered on the fly, at 60fps in a game.

 

[Order 66]

Ray tracing a scene...

Late 90's, early 2000s, ray tracing a single semi complex scene with a P4 would take hours, or overnight.

Today...pretty much rendered on the fly, at 60fps in a game.

Somewhat off topic, but how did movies that used RT at that time get released in a reasonable amount of time if it took that long for a single scene to render?

 

[Eximo]

Reminds me of PovRay days or early 3D Studio Max and waiting a long time for results. Now that would be the preview window.

 

[Eximo]

Somewhat off topic, but how did movies that used RT at that time get released in a reasonable amount of time if it took that long for a single scene to render?

Render farms. Massive render farms.

When you have a minute look up Silicon Graphics and their workstations, those were the machines people used to make Toy Story and the like.

Ooh, found the stats:


"A cluster of 117 (87 dual-processor and 30 quad-processor, 100-MHz) SPARCstation 20s with 192 to 384 megabytes of RAM, and a few gigabytes (4 or 5gb) of disk space each. They ran Solaris, with Pixar’s proprietary “Renderman” software, and a SparcServer 1000e for job distribution.

Pixar had some storage arrays totalling ~250GB (an SGI Challenge with 144 gigabytes, and a Sun array of 108 gigabytes) that the movie was ultimately rendered to before being backed up to magnetic tape (no more than 40GB per tape, likely less according to wikipedia’s specs on the Exabyte 8mm data tape aka data8 format) and then rendered to film for delivery, as the disk array was not actually large enough to store the final render in its entirety."

 

[punkncat]

A Pentium M 1.6 GHz or a Pentium 4 (even a 2.66 GHz one without HT) would boot up Windows XP and perform faster on a HDD back in the day than a Core i3-8130U would boot up Windows 11 Pro on a Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB and perform within today.

Otherwise you're right about the rose glasses aspect. Memories are always sweeter in the end; especially indulging them gaudily into the nocturnal hour, thinking of gone ventures in the hardware world...

Do you have anything at all aside from your memories that shows this to be the case? I would be willing to bet you don't because it simply...isn't. You cannot make empirical claims like this without something to back up the point of view.

 

[Order 66]

I was too young to be using a computer at this time, but it’s an interesting discussion. My 7700x and Samsung 980 pro and 32GB of RAM seems pretty quick even using lots of chrome tabs. I suppose I have no context for how it was during this time.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Ray tracing a scene...

Late 90's, early 2000s, ray tracing a single semi complex scene with a P4 would take hours, or overnight.

Today...pretty much rendered on the fly, at 60fps in a game.

That's true...

1. Let's think of another aspect, btw. In 1998 having 32-64 MB RAM was the norm. In 2006 that was 1 to 2 GB of memory. That's a difference in 8 years.

2. And let's take 2010-2011. The average memory was 4-8 GB. And 8 years later? In 2019 that would be 16 GB.

Point one - a x32 difference in 8 years.
Point two - a x2 to x4 difference in 8 years.

Going into the CPU spectrum:

1. Fastest CPU in 1998 was the Pentium II @ 450 MHz. And 8 years later in 2006 that was the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (4 cores / 2.66 GHz).

2. In 2010-2011 we can say one of the fastest CPUs was the Core i7-990X (6 cores / 12 threads @ 3.73 GHz). 8 years later in 2019 that would be the Core i9-10980XE (18 cores / 36 threads @ 4.8 GHz).

From these examples we can see that back in those begone years (1998-2006) the difference in performance scaled cumulatively and greatly with the years whilst moving ahead in time that pell-mell acceleration of specifications has considerably slackened. You could not do much with a Pentium II @ 450 MHz in 2006 unless if you were quite decadent. Whilst a Core i7-990X would still do a lot in 2019.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Do you have anything at all aside from your memories that shows this to be the case? I would be willing to bet you don't because it simply...isn't. You cannot make empirical claims like this without something to back up the point of view.

Well it is the truth. The Sempron 3300+ CPUs were on HP Compaq nx6125 machines (had quite a few). I used to do allnighters and open innumerable tabs (at least 40; many of which being Youtube) and even I was left breathless myself at how fluently everything did run. 720p was no problem for those machines (896 MB RAM / ATI Xpress 200M with 128 MB shared memory) The Pentium 4s were even faster. I cannot really go back in time to reproduce the effects but take my word on it. Those nights it was magical.

 

[Eximo]

I agree with that for most part. Since PCIe was introduced and we all switched to x86-64 the innovations in CPUs have been more muted. But that is only looking at consumer CPUs.

As mentioned, off CPU processing has become quite dominant in a lot of fields. SaaS has taken over so that client side performance matters a lot less. We aren't actually running the websites and search engines. Massive clusters of CPUs with TBs of RAM are.

 

[punkncat]

One of the major flaws in your suggestion is that this isn't some apples to apples comparison. XP was at most a 1.5GB installation using a "minimum" of 512MB of RAM. I cannot say for sure, but aren't there CPU out with that level of cache now?

There are tons more instructions loading, far richer and more capable possibilities all around. Heck, I recall waiting minutes for XP to load in fully and THEN waiting a few more minutes as my telco modem beeped and booped its way through authentication to get online.

Up until probably what 3-4 years ago I had a Pentium 1C/2T workstation down at my mother's house refreshing a desktop image daily for the sheer sake of keeping her internet connection from timing out and having to call the ISP to get it back on. I would walk up and turn it on, go down, have dinner, and by the time I got back it MIGHT have fully been online and certainly wasn't done checking the first round of updates. That was on DSL Broadband at least 5X faster than 56K (IIRC) dialup.
Let's not even discuss the time waiting for updates to complete....days if not more?

This premise is a fallacy, plain and simple.

 

[USAFRet]

In my stack of junk in the garage, I have a Dell Latitude laptop, from my old workplace.
PIII cpu(?), 1998 era.
1GB RAM, I think.

2 drives available, 1 Win 2000, 1 Puppy Linux.

It would take 3-4 minutes to boot up, with either drive.
If I easily had the power cable available, I would test this. (I don't)

Any system today that takes 3 minutes to present a usable desktop would result in. "OMG!!! WTF IS WRONG!!"

Rose colored glasses indeed.

 

[jnjnilson6]

In my stack of junk in the garage, I have a Dell Latitude laptop, from my old workplace.
PIII cpu(?), 1998 era.
1GB RAM, I think.

2 drives available, 1 Win 2000, 1 Puppy Linux.

It would take 3-4 minutes to boot up, with either drive.
If I easily had the power cable available, I would test this. (I don't)

Any system today that takes 3 minutes to present a usable desktop would result in. "OMG!!! WTF IS WRONG!!"

Rose colored glasses indeed.

Windows 2000 was a great OS. Very stable and hard. Ran faster on a Celeron Tualatin 1.3 GHz than Win11 runs on a Core i3-8130U I have home currently w/ Samsung 850 Pro. And that machine, the one that ran Win2000 had 256 MB RAM and a 40GB HDD.

Rose-colored glasses. Minutely flinging gone shards of forgotten light over indefinite distances like saxophones sighing and rendering a deafening party in obscurity over long blue lawns and under harsh white moons, drowning the incandescent light of laughter into subtlest red like vivacious sunsets ending distantly...