Which cpu change truly amazed you?

i have a few, like going from a Pentium 120 to a Cryix MII 250MHz, though the Cyrix was crap, the clock difference was enough to speed things up drastically. From a 486 DX2/66 to that Pentium 120 was a big one as well. One of the biggest performance leaps for me was going from Slot 1, Socket 7 to Slot A and Socket A and Socket 370 era cpus, this in my opinion is where the platforms really started to get juicy. Leaving Socket 7 K6 cpus to a Slot A 950 was tremendous and i literally saw and felt the difference, maybe because hard drives were starting to get decently fast as well and memory was'nt that expensive anymore.

In recent times it has to be from Socket A to 939, 939 feels snappier and also shows a decent difference in gaming etc.

I got a kick out of going from a 589 to a 590... then the Tpi985 came along, and it was the bomb.... nothing compared to the A88j44, though... that thing rocked!... and of course its predecessor, the B99k55... those letters rocked the previous ones! Then, oh then... the FRIGGIN SOCKET ULTIMATE 999 CAME ALONG!!!111!!!! OMG!!!!

My change was from a 680x0 to a Pentium-II... The change in assembler is horrible... Went from memory mapped IO to IO mapped IO.. Big endian to little endian.. brrr.. I still have trouble reading x386 assembly.. 680x0 assembly on the amiga was sooooo easy...

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Which cpu change truly amazed you?

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None, actually......................I guess the changes were too gradual for me. Also being older I am still in the habit of closing stuff when I have finished with it, and running the very minimum of applications.

My personal feeling/experience is that I noticed other developments far more.

1. The massive drop in RAM prices meant that I could afford 384Mb, or even 512Mb. That made one hell of a difference. Now, I have three PII machines (266/333/450) and there really isn't much to chose between them. Even a PIII/533Mhz doesn't seen noticeably faster.

I built my wife a box with a 1.3 Duron and 512Mb of PC133 RAM.............that really doesn't run that much different from her PI/150 with 256Mb of 72 pin EDO RAM. Mind you, the P/I is running Win 98 and the Duron is running ME :D

2. Video cards with 32/64/128Mb of RAM. These certainly seemed to provide much enhanced performance over the old 4Mb and 8Mb offerings (hey, I even have some 512k boards in my collection!!!!)

3. 7200RPM hard drives, these also seemed to enhance performance considerably over the old 3,800RPM devices.

I honestly question whether processor speed is that essential for the average home or office user. I have always felt that balance is essential, so you get a box today and it will have a 10,000RPM SATA drive, dual core processor, DDR2 RAM and a video card that in itself is more powerful than a lot of the older stuff I used to work on. You cannot attribute all that to the processor.

Operating systems also play a part. I have Win 95 on a Gateway 2000 with some sort of Cyrix 386 processor.............it runs like a dog...........yet goes quite well on a Toshiba T2130TS laptop that has a 486 DX4/75MHz processor. By comparison, running DOS 5.x on a Vectra V12 (286) is faster than both?

Once again I say "balance" and I suspect that current processors are way too powerful for most user's requirements.







:)

For every advance in hardware speeds there is an equal and opposite advance in the bloatware to soak it up.

I don't think anything has felt faster than my P3 733 running 98se with 256Mb ram.