Zoomer here, was this as bad as people said? It's my understanding that the long pipeline allowed for insane clock speeds (for 2000 standards), but that it didn't matter because branch prediction issues made it stall so frequently.
Zoomer here, was this as bad as people said?
Yes. It was slow, hot and power hungry, and people held onto their Tualatin Pentium 3s as long as possible. It was the Bulldozer of its day, and Core 2 rescued Intel from that half-decade episode of being raped by AMD - who then ironically replaced Phenom with Bulldozer.
Some of them were decent when it came to performance, but very power hungry and their temps were awful. I remember having the HT 3.06 Ghz Prescott 90nm chip, it was easily at 55-60°C at idle.
AMD had shit that was better at far lower frequencies, like 2.2 ghz or something. And ran cooler.
>And ran cooler
You had me up to here. Athlons ran pretty fricking hot too (I had a Windsor Athlon X2) - they just had the performance to justify melting through your table
depends on the generation
i had a barton xp 2500+
stock at 1.83 Ghz.
tuned up to 2.25.
ran idle around 40°c on air, side panels removed tho
>depends on the generation
Well yeah, that's what I'm getting at. AMD didn't have the problems scaling Athlon as Intel had scaling Netburst, but there were similarities.
We knock AMD for dropping Phenom now and ushering in the Constructor debacle, but they had pushed the Athlon architecture to its limits - there wasn't a great deal of difference between your Barton, my Windsor, and the very last Phenom.
>ushering in the Constructor debacle
eh, they were a stepping stone towards zen and its modularity, i can forgive them for that
despite having a piledriver myself and having soldered my power supply to the mobo bc 12v rail connector corroded from all the juice flowing through it
machine literally tried to commit sudoku
try to remove your side panels.
it may be shit airflow within the case
>it may be shit airflow within the case
No, it's fine under load. The 5800X just behaves like that. I can set the fans to full blast on my Dark Rock Pro 4 and it makes no difference.
>it was easily at 55-60°C at idle
wow so just like my 5800X then
Cooling back then was so different from today, citing and comparing temperatures is totally useless.
Explain literally one thing that's changed about CPU cooling in the last 20 years? Slap some thermal grease on a chunk of conductive metal and then either blow air onto it or run water through it. Other than needing different mounting brackets to accommodate new socket layouts, nothing about cooling has changed since the P4, the PIII, the PII or even the Pentium Pro.
Thermal density (and asymmetric distribution) of some modern CPUs is much higher. A cooler designed for a 130W TDP Intel CPU of 2009 can't handle a "105W" TDP Zen3 for example, and it's borderline on the "65W" ones. Such as the Noctua U12P (not the U12S, that one's even worse), which causes the 5900X to thermal throttle, presumably because the thin heatpipes don't transfer heat fast enough to the fins.
>Explain literally one thing that's changed about CPU cooling in the last 20 years?
20 years ago the coolers clipped onto a plastic extension of the socket itself, with a sprung-leaf clip, and if you messed up you'd put a screwdriver through the traces between your CPU and memory.
Coolers were small chunks of copper or aluminium with fins soldered on, because what held the cooler to the motherboard was the socket traces themselves. Large coolers were known to bend boards or damage sockets.
The top tier coolers of the time besides Noctua were flower style heatsink like the Zalman and Thermaltake Orb or some other exotic stuff, and those do not even come remotely close to being as good as even mid tier towers from today.
>Slap some thermal grease on a chunk of conductive metal and then either blow air onto it or run water through it.
You do realise that; "establish a strong thermal connection between source and drain" describes literally all cooling of everything ever right? Don't know what to tell you other than to say that's literally what heat transfer is.
>Other than needing different mounting brackets to accommodate new socket layouts
So other than being different it's totally the same. K.
Slow, power hungry and needed expensive memory.
No, I still have my Northwood machine with 512MB DDR. This was before memory controllers were moved off the north bridge and into the CPU, motherboard manufacturers could choose Rambus or DDR. In terms of heat it was pretty chill and massively overclockable, it's Prescott where Intel lost the plot.
Willamette was shit. Northwood was good. Prescott was shit.
Once Northwood was out, if you did anything but wait for Core2 (or go A64) you were wasting your money.
RAMBUS was introduced on Pentium-III, and almost no-one had it even in the P4 era.
>RAMBUS was introduced on Pentium-III, and almost no-one had it even in the P4 era.
i was gonna say, since when did the p4 support rambus? i thought that was just an itanium thing
i used several p4 machines and many of my friends owned them and none had rambus ram
>since when did the p4 support rambus?
Oh it did, i850 chipset, but basically no-one bought it.
The Dell 8250 was a RAMBUS system, and they're the hardest clamshell Dells to find.
Huh, really? I still have my 8250, didn't know they were that rare.
Finding RDRAM sticks or even CRIMMs at a reasonable price, even in this day and age is a b***h, however.
I owned one and it was sweet. Could play AOE 2, Halo, WC3, Minecraft(Alpha, Beta) no problems. Web browsing and adobe products all worked, I don't remember performance being bad but back then I was satisfied if something ran stable.
First PC I built was based on a Northwood 2.8 Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading. It was a hell of a system, lasted me many years. Ran hot. But it was supposed to. My current desktop/workstation PC is a Ryzen 3700X-based system. You know what it does a lot better than that old P4 system? Basically nothing. Shitty software just moves in to soak up any advances in hardware. Use whatever you want. These are tools, not a lifestyle.
Hot, and latency issues murdered performance. Yes it was a pile of shit.
A long time ago I had a laptop with a desktop version installed. At the office we called it the hovercraft because the fans would spin up even when doing the most basic tasks.
I had a dual cpu server board with them that I used as a space heater/file server
they were fast but inefficient and the performance per MHz was low
it was originally intended to scale up to many ghz, like 10+, but they soon enough found that wasn't going to happen
so it just ended up being kinda weird
fugg imagine hyberbipeline with moar goars :DDD
There's actually at least one guy out there who swears, to this day, that P-D was better than A64x2.
He's pretty based other than this one abominably shit opinion.
As I remember it OP, the Pentium 4s we're fast for about a year and then seemed slow. A 27 year old I knew when I was 13 built a custom PC in 2003 that could play halo and it was cool seeing how smooth the game could run on his PC along with everything else he was emulating. I the end the PCs that ran P3 chips and AMD 64 s seemed to be the best deals and offer the best life. I remember friends having to buy a new P4 every year because their computers would seem to slow down after about a year.
They were still pretty reliable, other than the Chinese Capacitor plague which other electronics of the same era also suffer from. It's just that all but the P4 Extreme editions were outperformed by cheaper AMD CPUs.
I have a pc with a late pentium 4 HT and it still holds up for basic web browsing including youtube. I have it running a light linux distro.
I had a Northwood P4 HT 3.06 w/ RDRAM until around the time that Windows 7 came out.
Great PC. I played games online all the time and never had overheating problems or anything.
I upgraded from a later-gen Pentium 2, so it felt like a significant leap.
Pentium D was really bad.