I installed and played Civilization II 😀
Mau1wurf1977 wrote on 2014-07-12, 17:49:However the PIII Tualatin still dominates in extreme CPU bound situations (512 x 386 in SLI). Maybe this is because of the difference in CPU architecture (The P4 has a longer pipeline). It takes a much higher clocked P4 to get get close to the PIII Tualatin in such situations.
Well first of all, you have to realize that the P4 sacrificed instructions per clock cycle in order to achieve high clock speeds. Very very very roughly speaking, a 1.0 ghz P3 was equivalent to a 1.5 ghz P4. However, on the 180 nanometer process, the P3 (Coppermine) had trouble reaching 1.13 ghz while the P4 (Willamette) topped out at 2.0 ghz; on the 130 nm process, the P3 (Tualatin) topped out at 1.4 but the P4 (Northwood) was able to hit 3.4 ghz. So I hope you're taking that into account, and not trying to compare the two at the same clock speed. That would be like saying a Volkswagen Bug (P3) would "dominate" in a race against a Formula 1 car (P4), just because the Formula 1 car requires higher RPM (clock speed) to keep up with the Bug.
Second, the P4 was commonly stated to have 4 integer units and only 2 floating-point units. However, I've also heard that it had 2 of each but ran the integer units at twice the clock speed of the rest of the CPU, or something like that, so 2 got counted as 4... whatever. The P3 and Athlon, by contrast, were more balanced (Athlon had 3 integer units and 3 floating-point units), so even when you adjusted for the difference in clock speeds (ie you threw a 1 ghz P3 against a 1.5 ghz P4, or a 2 ghz Athlon against a 3 ghz P4), the P4 did better on integer math but got its ass handed to it on floating-point math. 3D gaming is pretty heavy on the floating-point operations. There's a very good reason why, throughout the early and mid-2000s, the Athlon was considered the gaming and CAD chip and the P4 was considered the media editing (Photoshop, Premiere etc.) chip.
Holering wrote on 2014-07-16, 08:52:Why the heck isn't there low power consumption legacy hardware? Could you imagine a mobo with pentium 2, geforce mx 200, ram, sound blaster awe64, midi daughterboard, and ram on a single small pcb (or perhaps a single chip)? I've no doubt that it'd be possible in a low power, small form factor at least.
I had the same idea recently. The issue is that, when it comes to integrated circuits, development costs and other overhead costs are very high and per-unit manufacturing costs are pretty low, so a company needs to produce a LOT of a chip, like millions, for it to be profitable for them. Try convincing AMD or Intel that they're going to sell millions of a chip that's been obsolete for over 20 years. It's not impossible (the 386 continued to be manufactured for embedded systems all the way until 2007) but you need to talk about use cases other than Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries.
Honestly I think I'd be better off hiring a programmer to write drivers to allow Win98 to run on an Atomic Pi or something similar.
Holering wrote on 2014-07-16, 08:52:Heck Microsoft would benefit from releasing new Windows 9X licenses.
The problem there, from Microsoft's perspective, is that older versions of Windows are not patched/updated anymore, and are therefore more vulnerable to viruses and hacks, and every compromised system out there increases the risk of something bad happening to more modern and secure systems. Basically, computers running older versions of Windows are like unvaccinated people. They're mostly a threat to each other, but if there are enough of them, they can endanger the rest of us. Also, Microsoft's whole business model is now based on spying on its users and selling their information to other companies rather than selling OSes to us, and Win9x doesn't really fit with that. And hardware vendors probably pay Microsoft to constantly make Windows slower and heavier so that people have to constantly buy new hardware, and new Win9x licenses don't really fit with that.
You might have better luck acquiring a Win9x volume license on the secondary market, and using that to make and sell as many Win9x machines as you want. It's legal and Microsoft can't do crap about it.
Standard Def Steve wrote on 2014-07-16, 18:05:Was just blasting through F.E.A.R. on Dothan @ 2.7GHz/GTX-260 with everything cranked. Nice, smooth performance. I just love this CPU. Why Intel only made it for laptops is beyond me. PM on the desktop with a 667+FSB would have given AMD something to F.E.A.R. during the Socket 754-939 days.
Several motherboard vendors did, in fact, make desktop boards for the Pentium M 😀
Intel was not amused.
Since people like posting system specs:
LGA 2011
Core i7 Sandy Bridge @ 3.6 ghz
4 GB of RAM in quad-channel
Geforce GTX 780
1600 x 1200 monitor
Dual-booting WinXP Integral Edition and Win7 Pro 64-bit
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XP compatibility is the hill that I will die on.