6th generation x86 CPU Comparisons

http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/cpuwar.html

by luu • 2 years ago

127 35 2 years ago

azillionmonkeys.com

sydbarrett742• 2 years ago

The linked page was last updated 25 years ago.

zik• 2 years ago

It's still pretty interesting though if you're into CPU architecture. It's an interesting little slice of history.

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

The P6 is the direct ancestor of the Intel Core line of CPUs, which is on its 14th and 15th generation on desktop and mobile respectively and presumably will see the 16th generation release later this year.

(Screw the Intel Core(Ultra)<X> rebranding.)

So in that sense, this is a very interesting bit of history that's still relevant today.

rayiner• 2 years ago

When you said that I thought this was about the 1980s, not the late 1990s…

agumonkey• 2 years ago

the 80s are forever 20 years ago

krylon4• 2 years ago

I could tell. It loaded nearly instantly and rendered as fast it was loaded. (Also, I read that article on one beautiful afternoon in the summer of 2008.)

bayindirh• 2 years ago

As long as the information is accurate, does it matter?

sydbarrett742• 2 years ago

The 'News' bit of this site's name connotes that a majority of articles cover current events. When historical information is presented, the best practice is to cite the year parenthetically in the post's title. If this practice were followed more consistently, people less interested in purely historical content could skip over it more easily. HN could even grab the 'last updated' metadata from the linked page programmatically.

MBCook• 2 years ago

(1999)

Twirrim• 2 years ago

Wow, Cyrix. There's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

RetroTechie• 2 years ago

Yeah. Super Socket 7 was a great platform. Plugging cpu's from different manufacturers into a common socket, a choice of 3rd party chipsets, wide range of cpu speeds / TDP / price, and good longevity.

These days sockets are shortlived & each manufacturer has their own. Or cpu's (and even RAM) soldered directly onto a board so you can't upgrade anything.

krylon4• 2 years ago

Yeah, that sucks. Used to be, one could just replace a single component to upgrade one's PC, soon you could no longer just replace the CPU, you needed a new motherboard, which also required new RAM. We lost something there.

jonathanlydall• 2 years ago

3rd party chipsets not always a good thing.

I remember consistently having reliability issues with Windows 98 when installed on systems with VIA chipsets, but almost no problems with Intel chipsets. Gigabyte motherboards if it makes a difference, and yes, the chipset drivers were installed.

rasz• 2 years ago

Not only CPUs, but also multiple Chipset manufacturers all supporting same Socket 5-7-SS7. Performance delta between worst (some VIA, async cache) and best (TX, Pipelined) chipset/cache configuration was up to straight 50% https://dependency-injection.com/early-pentium-chipsets/ and thats before you picked CPU and graphic card :o Wild times.

krylon4• 2 years ago

My first PC had a Cyrix "P166+" running at 133MHz. That CPU used almost twice the power of a Pentium running at the same clock speed, yet many PC vendors put the same fans on both.

As a result, under heavy load, my PC would crash rather often, leading me to curse audibly until somebody pointed out the power vs fan issue to me and recommended I get a bigger fan. So I did. After that, it ran pretty stable.

Cyrix made a trade of in that CPU, the integer performance was far better than that of a Pentium at the same clock speed, the floating point performance lagged far behind. I got that machine in the summer of 1996, and then all my friends started playing Quake, which made me sad. Playing Quake (let alone Quake II) on that machine was more like staring at a slideshow. A 3dfx card was way outside my budget, unfortunately.

nxobject• 2 years ago

From the same period, Ars wrote an excellent non-technical introduction to the whole generation of architectures – "RISC vs CISC: the Post-RISC Era". [1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/features/1999/10/rvc/

eeeficus• 2 years ago

Jon Stokes also wrote Inside the machine[1], a great introduction to microprocessors architecture.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Machine-Introduction-Microproc...

ThinkBeat3• 2 years ago

Does anyone know what the latest/newest generation is?

With the i3/i5/i7/i9 naming convention I have lost track Unless i3.1s have essentially the same architecture as i3.xxx newest.

pkaye• 2 years ago

I think Meteor Lake is the upcoming generation. They are using big (P) and small cores (E) and chiplet technology (like AMD).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Lake

chx• 2 years ago

Meteor Lake is out.

The next ones are Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids on the server side, Arrow Lake on the desktop and Lunar Lake on the laptop.

And then comes Panther Lake supposedly next year which is both desktop and laptop and Gelsinger admitted betting the company on the 18A process it is using.

We shall see.

simne4• 2 years ago

It is unknown now, what will really be in future.

I think upcoming Intel CPUs will be hybrids of Skylake fast cores with Atom (whatever) energy-effective cores.

rwmj• 2 years ago

Wikipedia is the best source for this as its confusing unless you deal with it every day. FWIW Raptor Lake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake) is Intel's codename for its 13th & 14th generation of Core processors, and the one after will be called Arrow Lake and Meteor Lake (depending on if desktop or mobile).

Sharlin• 2 years ago

Intel Core is an eighth-generation microarchitecture, and the most recent Intel desktop CPUs are 14th gen Core processors. So the current generation is "8.14" as it were; the basic architecture is still more or less the same as it was 15 years ago.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

12th gen Core processors raise a question should change in multi-core architecture like bringing in multiple types of cores be considered drastic enough change?

simne4• 2 years ago

Conroe (Core_2_Duo) was after Netburst (P4); next leap was Haswell; and current Intel CPUs could be considered as significant enhanced Skylake.

So, if Netburst gen 7; Conroe gen 8; Haswell gen 9; Skylake gen 10.

Also exists separate branch of Bonnell (Atom), which is based on CMOS old p5 core and have totally different from desktop line generations.

And I don't consider MMX and Netburst as separate generations, but as dead end branches. If consider all dead-ends we should be over 20.

AMD have significantly less number of generations, I think Ryzen could be considered something like k-11.

simne4• 2 years ago

It is unknown now, what will really be in future.

I think upcoming Intel CPUs will be hybrids of Skylake fast cores with Atom (whatever) energy-effective cores.

6th generation x86 CPU Comparisons

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