The Future, The Past: Part 1: The Pentium 3 and Intel

This is part one of a series of posts that leads up, in total, to what I see as the future of intel, AMD, nvidia, and even some of the console and OS makers.

So today I want to present you with a little bit of research that isn't exactly complete, but that leads up to this theory that I know will annoy a lot of people and honestly it annoys me. The Intel as we know it today in the common market was built off the back of the P6 architecture and the Pentium 3.

The chips and machines I will be using as examples today go as follows:

HP NW8000 (Pentium M 1C/1T 2 GHZ 2MB cache Dothan)
Apple Macbook 2,1 (Core Duo 2C/2T T2400 2MB cache Yonah)
IBM 600X (Pentium 3 1C/1T 650MMX 650MHz 256K cache Coppermine)
Acer AspireOne KAV10 D150 (Atom N270 1C/2T 1.677 GHZ 512K cache Diamondville)

So where I want to start is actually with the Pentium Pro (PP). When the PP came out everyone was excited about the performance boost. As tech got better and better, the pentium 2 came along with improvements on the cache speeds. After P2, the P3, P3 Xeon, and P3 Celeron. No one was all too excited about it. It offered a new instruction that no one was going to use for a long time (in comparison to chip releases), had the same amount of cache, and no one really cared about the faster clocks, especially those with dual processor systems. As time went on the P3 got better support on more and more things, obviously, and as systems died people started buying the P3. Since no one had much interest in the pentium 3, intel decided they needed something now since no one was terribly excited about their previous design and came out with the pentium 4. While I, and those of the insane asylums in india, like the P4, at the time it was a fire hazard almost literally. It was priced too high and people started to demand the P3 come back, which made Intel punch the clock rates into the sky as people were introduced to 1.2/4/5 GHz chips on the P4 side.

As time went on, the mobile pentium 4's were AWFUL. I have talked about this before; pentium 3's were still in demand, needed a mobile chip, Intel was against AMD with these wierd "Cores" and 64 bit thing.... Pentium M! Throw it out there feed the fish quick!!! Pentium M was still based on the P3. Soon after came the Core series, which people were getting all spun up about for what was GOING to be the Core 2 series of chips. The Core Duo and Solo weren't seen here often, mostly used in OEM jobs like the macbooks, and pre-mades that weren't big box. @wendell wanted a duo so he ordered one from Japan, and aparently a lot of people were doing that. On the Solo's, as much as I can tell, the performance of a 2GHz core PM to a CS was minimal at best. They didn't have that much of a boost other than the die shrink from 90nm to 65nm. In fact, you could even call them a refresh since there was nothing that was actually added extension wise. The real power came with the Core Duo which was 2 separate dies on the same chip, like the early core 2's.

When the Core 2's came out everyone was excited that they were going to kick AMD's ass. AMD had the phenoms come out and they were doing pretty well. But what people didn't even realize was that the next big thing, netbooks, was still going to be P6 based. I can only give an example of the chip I have, but a lot of the atoms that came out were the same, albeit with different power parameters and some of the new extensions duct taped to the side on some chips, on top of the SOC magic. But as far as I can tell, the 32 bit Atoms, my N270 as an example, are just another extension of the P6 line. The performance is that of my NW8000, has the same lag my macbook can get, and is faster than its old grampa 600X.

Now what I reckon is that, as I said, the Intel we know has been built off the back of the pentium 3. First the pentium 3 got popular after the pentium 2 and just before the pentium 4, then when the P4 was getting plastered in the mobile market the "PM" saved the day (and a really lot of review sites loved laptops like mine that had high clock pentium M chips, even more so when the Dothan chips came out and you could directly upgrade from Banias and keep a good laptop) and got some recognition in places. Then, when the core series spun up, it got popular everywhere but here, but people still desired them in the somewhat enthusiast market. Not only that but the macbooks sold like crazy. When the atoms came out the old P6 carried the entire netbook craze till it died out in 2012. Anything else was from help from AMD (AMD64). So, the longest running chip was also the most famous in its class and no one realized what they were actually using.

Funny huh?

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For note I did benchmarks from my personal list as well as from a short list of games that will be compatible. I didn't post them because I feel theres more I can do. Each machine listed is on ubuntu 17.04 so if you need to see something let me know.

That wasn't the case, every MHz, and especially in dual cpu systems meant a lot.
(I was quite active in dual p2, p3 era in slot2) I was very excited when I was upgrading my dual p2 233MHz cpu's to p3 133MHz FSB ~630MHz ish. (later came out the different socket 370, and only small amount of people updated to that socket.) Then AMD was much better, and no1 really cared much for intel.

I agree, it was pricey as fck; and amd was still better. Pentium D was bad also.

All mobile cpu's were aweful, only recently like from 2008/9 mobile cpu's got better.

Core2Duo, Core2Quad were quite popular, and weren't priced skyhigh like pentium4/d was. Core2Solo is like Celeron joke.

Aside from anything stated, intel was going into GHurtz; more GHz more performance = ppl were like 2GHz, no, 3GHz, 4GHz in 2010 we're going to be flying on 5GHz.

What the fuck I thought that was a joke I didn't even know that was real!

I dunno. Mobile pentium 3's kept intel alive. They're pretty great.

From all that I have read up on a lot of old forums (like 27 or 28, also chatting on IRC with people, content on youtube, etc), the general consensus was that the P3 wasn't worth the platform jump when a P3 that was 800 MHZ couldn't outclass a dual 360 / 400 mhz P2 that were becoming easier to grab. Some boards were compatible via card slot though, and those who wanted the upgrade would do it that way eventually, but the release price on the 450 and 500's was too high to justify.

core2solo, shit is real boi.

Well there were little to no differences between P2 and P3; thats why most mobo's were known to be P2/P3 (but didn't support FSB 133MHz out of the box (it had standard 100MHz), so you could argue P3 was just overclocked FSB to make it faster)

P3 @ 800MHz was already at socket 370 (and AMD was rocking the world at that time already with cheap durons and more expensive athlons little bit later; so there wasn't much reason to stay with intel at the time; not to mention p2/3 were power loud big hogs.)

i've seen some people manged to modify slot1 pcb to support socket 370 on top of it. It was nice hack back in the time.

original slot1

hacked pcb slot1

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cough I have one of those ;w;

The mod chip, not core2solo.

made corrections it was called slot1 not slot2 >_> not sure where my memory failed.

When you switched from EDO to SODIMM.

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i was thinking on making my old build 2x P3 Slot1 build. But when i saw prices on some of the mobo's i was like. "Maybe i'll wait another decade, see if they got any cheaper."

No they won't. They are getting surprisingly popular in the modscene.

starts fapping

then i see the price

Heh, yup. Tried to get one at a trade show that didn't even work and the guy wanted like 350 for it.

From day 1 with consumers it has always been about getting more performance. Moore's law was in effect until processors reached about 1.5/2 ghz. Especially in the early days those were big gains year after year. AMD actually pushed Intel back then to go faster. Without AMD we would probably still be at 800mhz today. You needed the performance as the software got slower and more complex.

The 440BX era was very exciting.

If you saying that the processor architecture hasn't changed much then your right. Processor architecture and programming operating systems as we do today was locked in as far as the x86 instruction set in 1985 which was just implementing what was learned in the 1970's. Since then it's always been about improving transistor switching speed, memory latency and trace length. WIth the pentium III and 1ghz clock speeds the writing was on the wall and they shifted toward better branch prediction and IPC. The AMD K6 got it right while Intel was bribed and sold out to Rambus and went with the P4 design which wouldn't have been so bad if Rambus could have delivered on the promise of a faster memory bus. But also people weren't going for Intel trying to do an IBM with proprietary technology. The PC industry is about competition and without it it stagnates as Intel has done since 2010.