What is your favorite CPU of all time...

[The Q6660 Inside]

Chose your favorite all-time CPU out of these 10 from various generations, whether it be bang for the buck or sheer power and effect on the on the PC world today!
If your favorite it is not on the poll specify below but remember to chose one on the actual poll ...

 

[ciaranmc2011]

Did you not have another thread just like this?

 

[The Q6660 Inside]

Yes, I forgot you could change the expiry date
Yepifail

 

[iceclock]

i def think the 486 days was a game changer,

 

[neon neophyte]

i had to vote amd athlon 64. back in the days when amd was showing intel just how its done. when intel thought pentium 4s were the way to go (oh god what a nightmare.)

athlons brought about the concept of higher ipcs being dominate over mhz and were very overclockable.

i yearn for days to be like the time of the reign of the athlon

of course my first real pc was a 80386 DX. which i didnt find out until a decade later was actually made by amd.

 

[iceclock]

lol,

 

[Brett928S2]

K62 450

 

[iceclock]

i did own a k6-2 450 was not bad for the time.

 

[das_stig]

Celeron 300A, had one over 500mhz and it kicked the crap out of those expensive Pentium IIs.

 

[iceclock]

i hated celerons, so bad.

 

[MU_Engineer]

I picked the Pentium Pro as it introduced a bunch of features not seen on previous x86 CPUs.

- First x86 CPU to have on-CPU L2 cache
- First x86 CPU to use out of order execution
- First x86 CPU to have more than two instruction pipelines
- First multi-chip module x86 CPU, and the only x86 CPU to have more than two chips in an MCM (1 MB L2 PPro)
- Introduced the i686 ISA which was the last major revision to the 32-bit x86 ISA
- First x86 CPU to be able to be run in more than a two-processor configuration
- Introduced the P6 microarchitecture which was used in every subsequent Intel CPU, excepting the Itanium, NetBurst products, and the Atom
- Only PGA x86 CPU that doesn't use a square socket and the only CPU I know of that has two different pin grid pitches in the same socket.

 

[rds1220]

I agree with MU the Pentium Pro.

 

[Cazalan]

Athlon 64 - When metallic pens and xacto blades could overclock and make cpus work on dual CPU boards.

 

[iceclock]

this has started an interesting debate, i think its also opinion on witch was the most preferred cpu.

 

[Ramzzz2936]

pentium 4

 

[The Q6660 Inside]

pentium 4

You haz gawtz to bee kiddun meh. :lol:

 

[sarinaide]

It is hard to state which is due to the changes through evolution.

Intel's PIII with MMX instruction set was a pretty good CPU, AMD K6 and K7 arches with the Athlon64 and X86-64 instruction set was revolutionary for its time. First Intel Core2 extremes and birth of extreme processors. i7 990X for a good two years dominated all x86 parts and then you have Sandy and Ivy. While it is to early to say how FX and A-Series will turn out notably APU's are fantastic works of micro engineering while we have to wait until Excavator to know the extent and successes of AMD's HSA approach which will potentially have the most drastic influence on computing yet.

 

[popatim]

I picked the Pentium Pro as it introduced a bunch of features not seen on previous x86 CPUs.

- First x86 CPU to have on-CPU L2 cache
- First x86 CPU to use out of order execution
- First x86 CPU to have more than two instruction pipelines
- First multi-chip module x86 CPU, and the only x86 CPU to have more than two chips in an MCM (1 MB L2 PPro)
- Introduced the i686 ISA which was the last major revision to the 32-bit x86 ISA
- First x86 CPU to be able to be run in more than a two-processor configuration
- Introduced the P6 microarchitecture which was used in every subsequent Intel CPU, excepting the Itanium, NetBurst products, and the Atom
- Only PGA x86 CPU that doesn't use a square socket and the only CPU I know of that has two different pin grid pitches in the same socket.

And it helps that it was a powerful cpu for its time, taking on p2's that were clocked twice as high. I think the first P2 that ran faster than my PPro rig was a 450. I just remembered I was overclocked to a whopping 225. Wow! LOL

 

[MU_Engineer]

Athlon 64 - When metallic pens and xacto blades could overclock and make cpus work on dual CPU boards.

That was the Athlon XP series, not the Athlon 64. The Athlon XPs used the same socket as the dual-CPU Athlon MPs and could be modified to be both SMP-capable and overclockable by filling in laser-cut traces on the CPU package. AMD locked multipliers in firmware for A64s and put desktop and server in different sockets.

If you are talking about great AMD CPU hacks, I think the "golden fingers" overclocking on Slot A CPUs and core/cache unlocking on Phenom IIs have to rank up there as well. I wonder if Bulldozer will have any similar things out there or if it will be like A64 and have none.

And it helps that it was a powerful cpu for its time, taking on p2's that were clocked twice as high. I think the first P2 that ran faster than my PPro rig was a 450. I just remembered I was overclocked to a whopping 225. Wow! LOL

The PPro was very fast due to that full-speed L2 cache. They were also ridiculously expensive too, although I seem to remember the 300 MHz Pentium II Klamath was some ridiculous sum like $2000 when it was introduced as well. Just curious, what kind of PPro machine did you have?

 

[twelve25]

None of these really seemed like stand outs to me. Sure, they were all awesome for their time and beat the previous generation by a good bit. THat's what is supposed to happen. It would be easier to point out the failures, like P4 D and Bulldozer. The rest all just performed as expected.

 

[redh4t]

AMD Athlon 64 for sure. It was like BAM, 64bits, what?

 

[jaguarskx]

Athlon XP - Showed Intel that GHz wasn't every. IPC was the way to go. Cheaper than the Pentium 4 and generally performed better in games. The P4s were still better in some things though like video encoding and 3D rendering.

C2D E6600 - Beats AMD at their own game.

 

[jaideep1337]

I'm happy with my Phenom II so I'm gonna go with that

 

[Hellboy]

The 386, the 486 was just a 386 with a maths co processor built in...

remember when autocad machines had to have the maths co processor added...

Now that was a game changer - it was the first desktop 32bit processor from intel..

How long has 32 bit software lingered and they stopped making these for phones in 2006

 

[neon neophyte]

the 486 was not just a 386 with a math co processor built into it.

the 386 dx was just a 386 with a math co processor built into it. the 486 was an entirely different beast.

edit:
Differences between the 386 and 486

* An 8 KB on-chip SRAM cache stores the most commonly used instructions and data (16 KB and/or write-back on some later models). The 386 had no such internal cache but supported a slower off-chip cache.
* Tightly coupled pipelining allows the 486 to complete a simple instruction like ALU reg,reg or ALU reg,im every clock cycle. The 386 needed two clock cycles for this.
* Integrated FPU (disabled or absent in SX models) with a dedicated local bus gives faster floating point calculations compared to the i386+i387 combination.
* Improved MMU performance.

The 486 has a 32-bit data bus and a 32-bit address bus. This required either four matched 30-pin (8-bit) SIMMs or one 72-pin (32-bit) SIMM on a typical PC motherboard. The 32-bit address bus means that 4 GB of memory can be directly addressed.