Kocyk wrote on 2024-10-09, 21:48:
In 2005, my friends' best PCs were Athlon XP and Pentium4 3.2 GHz. Hard to believe that these computers were not as powerful as I thought.
Here's the thing - computers back then typically had a 4 year lifecycle, maybe less if you had more money. So, assuming a normal distribution of computer ages, if you were to visit 4 friends in 2005, one friend would have a brand new computer (that just replaced a 4 year old one), one friend would have a one year old computer, one friend would have a two year old computer, and one friend would have a three year computer. Unless, say, you were in first year university and everybody had gotten new computers to take to university (which is/was a very common practice in North America), not everybody would have computers the same age.
So, the average computer at any time is two years old, which happens to align with your Athlon XP/Pentium 4 recollection for 2005.
And there would have been nothing wrong with Athlon XPs and Pentium 4s in 2005, no one would be e-wasting 2-year old systems, but... at the same time, they were not the most powerful thing you could get in 2005. They would be the 'average' in a world of 4-year lifecycles. And then, of course, in 2006, came the C2D, which Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech described as "the most impressive piece of silicon the world has ever seen - and the fastest desktop processor we've ever tested."
(Now, if you had a Pentium MMX in 2005, I can understand why you would have such memories of Athlon XPs and Pentium 4s as super-powerful...)