BeginnerGuy wrote:Of course they were expensive.. the dx4 100 was released in 1994 for $650 alone.. Pentium systems from gateway 2000 were $3000 for base models in late 1993, but they were on the shelves for consumers since 93 for 60 and 66.
Well, my point is that people these days tend to google the launch date for a certain CPU, and then equate that to the date that the CPU had mainstream adoption.
It may work that way today, but not back then. It took years for new CPUs to trickle down into the mainstream. The marketing model was entirely different.
These days they launch Xeons/Opterons for the server/workstation market, and at the same time they release cheaper spinoffs of the same basic architecture for mainstream and budget systems. So a new architecture is affordable and adopted almost immediately.
Back then, when a new CPU was launched, it WAS the 'Xeon/Opteron', and initially it was only found in high-end server/workstation machines, way out of reach of the average consumer. Last-generation CPUs would form the mainstream, and CPUs of two or more generations back were the budget models.
So even though the Pentium had been around for a while yet in 1994, and the 486 had been around since 1989, it was still a mainstream option for consumers (and at the high-end at that).
Pentium didn't really crack the mainstream until 1996 or so. Before that, they were simply too expensive, so people went for 486 machines instead.