Me too.
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Your input requested: Scope of the Pentium subforum
- Thread starter vwestlife
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Me too.
lowen
Veteran Member
Off-topic, I know, but I will say this: C2D U7500 through U7700 are pretty snappy with Windows 7 64-bit with 4GB of RAM on those Toughbooks. All of these are clocked below 1.4GHz.
Back to vintage, clock speed is just about meaningless, and always has been. Take the SGI Indigo2 line, for instance. The R10K IMPACT series is at least twice as fast as the R4K-based ones, even with the R4K clocked at a higher speed, and the R8K POWER Indigo2 is a beast of completely different color (reference: http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/i2info.html#3.2.1)
But even in the vintage PC arena, think of how similarly a 386DX40 and a 486DX25 perform; I remember seeing benchmarks showing a 486SX20 outperforming 386DX33.
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Cimonvg
Experienced Member
hello
some more brainstorming - Sub grouping could be oriented by which OS's the hardware can run
8 bit ( 8088 )
16 bit ( 286 )
32 bit ( 386-486 )
64 bit ( Pentium + -> )
again just a thought.
/cimonvg
hello again - I know my idea (above) were not the only/best/genius , it were more like a new angle in the quest for a "perfect" definition in the subdivision discussion... sometimes it is giving to see it all from a new angle, then to return and find the "perfect" solution to the assignment
And yes i know 8088 run 16 bit (internal), and (now i also know) pentium only later did run 64 bit...
.. but again, my post was written in the new angle, spirit /cimonvg
1ST1
Veteran Member
And you forgot 8088's big brothers 8086 and 80186, both 16 bit external but still XT class PC, 8086 quite popular with Olivetti M24 / AT&T 6300, 80186 very rarely used.
cmc
Experienced Member
This gets my vote.
vladstamate
Experienced Member
This gets my vote as well.
I would agree with covering anything Pre-XP. Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs would be a stretch. Machines and components from that era still bring back good memories of days gone by, but the user experience is so similar to a modern system that it's hard to distinguish them as vintage. Pentium 3 and comparable Athlons are fun to shoe horn into modern uses, but they are much more comfortable with Win9x and things from that era.... which IMO is vintage.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Which are utterly incompatible with standard "PC" peripherals. There was at least one attempt to market a system using a 186/188 CPU and employ standard 82xx peripherals. There really was no benefit, however. The V40 fared somewhat better.
I remember the 186 well because I did some development using early steppings of pre-release silicon. A frustrating experience--I never in a million years would have suspected that the SI and DI registers were used by the DMA hardware.
------------------
But the 186 really was indicative of the original course set by Intel development. The successor to the 8086 was, at one time, being promoted as the iAPX 432--the ridiculously high-priced multichip implementation of a 32 bit under-performing architecture. The x86 family was envisioned as an embedded family, with the 432 taking over "serious" computation. Fortunately, that didn't last and the pressure was on for the 80286, which was being sampled at about the same time as the 186.
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lowen
Veteran Member
Tandy 2000 is the only marketed 186 MS-DOS compatible that I know of; are you thinking of another? Tandy had serious issues with the chips themselves, too, as documented by Frank Durda on comp.sys.tandy on a few occasions.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
There were several. For example, there's the Durango Poppy, which also has optional 80286 support running Xenix. (I'm still looking for one). A laptop using the 80186 was the IQ80186 and the Dumont Magnum. Probably the second most famous, the Mindset. There was the Siemens PC-D--well, let Wikipedia sum it up (their list isn't complete):
In short, everyone who drank the Intel Kool-Aid.
In short, everyone who drank the Intel Kool-Aid.
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A few caching IDE controllers used it and my Adtron CF to SCSI adapter uses it. So it did make it into some PCs
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Chuck(G)
25k Member
186/188 embedded was all over the place. Cipher tape drives, USR modems, various SCSI controllers,....and I think even a few laser printers.
bhtooefr
Experienced Member
It's also worth noting that the HP Hornet SoC (in the 100LX/200LX/1000CX/700LX) wasn't using the entire 80186, only the actual CPU core, with XT-compatible peripherals. So...
In any case, I'm against subforum proliferation, so I think it'd be a bad idea to split P6 designs into their own subforum.
There's a few ways to look at it:
Software: DOS era (8088, early 286), Windows pre-3.0 era (286, early 386, VERY early 486), Windows 3.x era (late 286, 386, 486), Windows 9x era (Pentium through Pentium III). And, I agree that XP is becoming out of scope, but then how do you handle 2000? (I'm inclined to say that it's OK, because it wasn't the mainstream OS at the time, whereas XP was, even though there's a lot of similarity between them.)
Bitness: 20 address/16 ALU/8 data and 20/16/16 (808x), 24/16/16 (286), 32/32/32 and 24/32/16 (386, 486), 32/32/64 and 36/32/64 (Pentium, P6, and NetBurst through early Prescott). However, I agree that Prescott is getting out of scope - late Prescott can run Windows 10 for crying out loud!
System architecture: XT (8-bit), AT (16-bit, but extends into the 386 era quite deeply and early 80486s), AT+EISA and AT+VLB (32-bit), AT+PCI (32-bit, later 64-bit, and includes some late 486s), AT+PCI+AGP (32-bit but much higher clock speed). PCIe is out of scope, although AGP goes deep into the XP era...
So, the question is, what's the rationale behind keeping 8088 and 80286 together, while splitting 80386 and 80486 out from them, and then a third category for Pentiums? For "normal users", I could absolutely see, 8088 and 286 is the DOS-only era, 386 and 486 is the Windows 3.x era, Pentium is the Windows 95 era, though... and under that rationale, where the Pentium subforum is really the Windows 95 subforum (even though there's a sticky saying software support is offtopic...), I'd argue that you can either go from the direction of, "was this intended to run 98 SE/Me as its primary OS", or the direction of "can this run a currently supported OS". From the former, you get every Coppermine (yet possibly NOT some VIA C3s that are less capable, because they were targeted at XP first). From the latter, you have to cut off Coppermines past 800 MHz (even though, really, what's the difference between an 800 MHz Coppermine and a 1000 MHz one? Neither shipped with XP unless it was a late Celeron or something just before Tualatin...)
Myself, I'm inclined to say "unable to run a currently supported mainstream Windows release" for hardware covered, and "pre-XP" for software covered if any, with the caveat that closely related hardware within reason is also in scope, as long as it's running covered software. So, I'd say a Tualatin 1400-S is OK if it's running 2000 or Me or older, because it's really just a variant of an on-topic platform, with go-faster stripes. This rule gets fuzzier with AMD, because the Athlon XP is closely related to the Thunderbird, though, so maybe just declaring a "Socket 4 to Socket 370 for Intel, Socket 5 to Socket A pre-Athlon XP for AMD" rule would be the way to go.
Also, it's worth noting that we're just over a year away from Vista hitting end of support, elevating the CPU limit to 1 GHz under those rules...
In any case, I'm against subforum proliferation, so I think it'd be a bad idea to split P6 designs into their own subforum.
There's a few ways to look at it:
Software: DOS era (8088, early 286), Windows pre-3.0 era (286, early 386, VERY early 486), Windows 3.x era (late 286, 386, 486), Windows 9x era (Pentium through Pentium III). And, I agree that XP is becoming out of scope, but then how do you handle 2000? (I'm inclined to say that it's OK, because it wasn't the mainstream OS at the time, whereas XP was, even though there's a lot of similarity between them.)
Bitness: 20 address/16 ALU/8 data and 20/16/16 (808x), 24/16/16 (286), 32/32/32 and 24/32/16 (386, 486), 32/32/64 and 36/32/64 (Pentium, P6, and NetBurst through early Prescott). However, I agree that Prescott is getting out of scope - late Prescott can run Windows 10 for crying out loud!
System architecture: XT (8-bit), AT (16-bit, but extends into the 386 era quite deeply and early 80486s), AT+EISA and AT+VLB (32-bit), AT+PCI (32-bit, later 64-bit, and includes some late 486s), AT+PCI+AGP (32-bit but much higher clock speed). PCIe is out of scope, although AGP goes deep into the XP era...
So, the question is, what's the rationale behind keeping 8088 and 80286 together, while splitting 80386 and 80486 out from them, and then a third category for Pentiums? For "normal users", I could absolutely see, 8088 and 286 is the DOS-only era, 386 and 486 is the Windows 3.x era, Pentium is the Windows 95 era, though... and under that rationale, where the Pentium subforum is really the Windows 95 subforum (even though there's a sticky saying software support is offtopic...), I'd argue that you can either go from the direction of, "was this intended to run 98 SE/Me as its primary OS", or the direction of "can this run a currently supported OS". From the former, you get every Coppermine (yet possibly NOT some VIA C3s that are less capable, because they were targeted at XP first). From the latter, you have to cut off Coppermines past 800 MHz (even though, really, what's the difference between an 800 MHz Coppermine and a 1000 MHz one? Neither shipped with XP unless it was a late Celeron or something just before Tualatin...)
Myself, I'm inclined to say "unable to run a currently supported mainstream Windows release" for hardware covered, and "pre-XP" for software covered if any, with the caveat that closely related hardware within reason is also in scope, as long as it's running covered software. So, I'd say a Tualatin 1400-S is OK if it's running 2000 or Me or older, because it's really just a variant of an on-topic platform, with go-faster stripes. This rule gets fuzzier with AMD, because the Athlon XP is closely related to the Thunderbird, though, so maybe just declaring a "Socket 4 to Socket 370 for Intel, Socket 5 to Socket A pre-Athlon XP for AMD" rule would be the way to go.
Also, it's worth noting that we're just over a year away from Vista hitting end of support, elevating the CPU limit to 1 GHz under those rules...
Caluser2000
Banned
Of course using a version of Windows to catergorise Pentium class systems isn't that good and idea either. Personnally I like the variety of OSs this class of system can run. Some folk like to push systems to the limits.
For me personnally this section refers to the original P1 systems through to super socket 7 systems and possibly Pentium Pros. Anything other than those I pop on over to vogons.org. It seems a more approprate forum and stops this being a Windows 9x-XP help forum.
My understanding is this forum was intended for 486s and lower in the Intel/AMD/Cyrix/etc line. Raven saw a need for a P1 section so asked for one to be created in the original VC forum.
For me personnally this section refers to the original P1 systems through to super socket 7 systems and possibly Pentium Pros. Anything other than those I pop on over to vogons.org. It seems a more approprate forum and stops this being a Windows 9x-XP help forum.
My understanding is this forum was intended for 486s and lower in the Intel/AMD/Cyrix/etc line. Raven saw a need for a P1 section so asked for one to be created in the original VC forum.
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chemdream
Experienced Member
Coming in late on the conversation. I agree that p5 - piii should be grouped in one sub forum. P4 seems to new to be discussed here? And it is a completely new architecture...
I'm posting this from a Toshiba Tecra 8000 with 256 MB of RAM (maximum the motherboard can take) and a Pentium-II CPU.
I would posit this is a vintage computer.
Code:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 6
model name : Mobile Pentium II
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 366.604
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr
bogomips : 730.72I would posit this is a vintage computer.
carangil
Experienced Member
This is exactly my feelings as well. This is my defense of SS7 being vintage: Proper ISA slot support. My SS7 board has ISA slots, with an ISA sound blaster installed. It has an AT keyboard connector, in an AT case with an AT power supply. It also supports ATX power supply, but the board is a Baby-AT form factor, just with a couple extra holes to also fit in a ATX case, and has an extra power connector. It can boot DOS, and Sound Blaster games can run with no shim driver. It also is the end-of-the-line for what I feel are vintage PCs. Everything newer than this is PCI slot only and beyond, and you need various levels of hacks to get sound working. Yes, it also has an AGP port and can run 3D accelerated games. But it is more of a 'classic' PC architecture with a bunch of stuff added on.