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Should Pentium II/III Systems Have a Forum?

Should Pentium II/III systems have their own forum?

  • Yes

    Votes: 14 66.7%

  • No

    Votes: 6 28.6%

  • Unsure

    Votes: 1 4.8%
  • Total voters
    21
  • Poll closed .
vwestlife said:
Pentium implies five, as in 586, but Intel stuck with the name because everyone joked about the next CPU generation after it being called the Sexium.
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Yeah, I remember that. Unfortunately I was enough of a nerd to know that if they’d stuck to Greek it would have actually been the “Hexium”, not “Sexium”, so it fell pretty flat. (*) Which, I dunno, probably would have spawned its own jokes about it being named after an ingredient from a recipe to cast a gypsy curse.

(* Elon Musk probably thought it was hilarious.)
 
I don't about the rest of you, but I draw the line with the Core 2 Duo. That one was a game changer.
 
Core2 and the slightly later switchover by AMD to Phenom do make for a nice across the board demarcation. Probably makes more sense to have the Pentium 4 machines sold at the same time as Tualatin machines sharing the topic. Tossing in the dual core and 64-bit P4 and Athlon designs stretches the topic to covering about 10 years.
 
Core 2 Duo machines are still very much modern PCs able to do modern things, whereas even 15 years ago, Pentium 4 and older machines were already falling behind in terms of their real world usability. (And on the Mac side, the PowerPC architecture got left in the dust even more rapidly.)
 
"Vintage" is a moving target, and it is always "in the eye of the beholder."

General consensus is that vintage means no longer sold, and at least 20-25 years old. All Pentium, Pentium II and most Pentium III systems fall into this range. At vintage events, it seems as though most younger attendees also consider Pentium 4s to be vintage, but that's still debatable.

Remember that we have members who still daily drive cars that are over 60 years old, and don't consider them vintage. Where I live there are a lot of farms, and there is plenty of farm equipment from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in daily use. Given this we can say that vintage depends on perspective and is constantly changing.

In the end, the answer is that there is no need to argue about what is, or what is not, vintage.

- Alex
 
ajacocks said:
"Vintage" is a moving target, and it is always "in the eye of the beholder."

General consensus is that vintage means no longer sold, and at least 20-25 years old. All Pentium, Pentium II and most Pentium III systems fall into this range. At vintage events, it seems as though most younger attendees also consider Pentium 4s to be vintage, but that's still debatable.

Remember that we have members who still daily drive cars that are over 60 years old, and don't consider them vintage. Where I live there are a lot of farms, and there is plenty of farm equipment from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in daily use. Given this we can say that vintage depends on perspective and is constantly changing.

In the end, the answer is that there is no need to argue about what is, or what is not, vintage.

- Alex
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were I live its not uncommon to see horses still used on farms... But yes I tend to agree, we can argue till the cows come home on what is retro, what is vintage and what is outdated and hardly anyone is going to change their minds. But I do think piii/axp is a good cut off as anything newer can still be used for a lot of tasks.
 
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Calling anything descended from the IBM PC lineage “vintage” is always going to be a fraught exercise given it’s literally the last thing standing that has any direct binary compatibility with anything from the undisputed “olden days” of personal computers. (Real mode is still buried in modern x86 CPUs, although with the phasing out of BIOS backwards compatibility as a UEFI payload it’s getting harder to actually lay hands on it without some level of virtualization…)

That said, I’m personally probably fine at this point with pretending the label applies to anything x86 that doesn’t support AMD64/x86-64 software. There are some edge cases, like a few Atom family parts that made it into the mid-2010’s and some 32-bit-only embedded CPUs still being sold, but from a mainstream desktop perspective that wraps it up decently enough. So if you *reaaaaaally* want to pretend that a Pentium 4 is a “Vintage Classic”, sure, whatever, go ham.
 
I think the dividing line is (absent servers/embedded/industrial) if a machine has a PCIe bus or not. Now, PCIe is everything, before, we had AGP, EISA, MCA, ISA, VLB, etc.

To your point, too @Eudimorphodon, I'm not aware of any non-x86-64 "PC descendants" that are 32 bit and have PCIe. So, 32/64bit is a goot cut-off, too.

Given that, the first generation Intel Atom CPUs are arguably vintage, given that they are low-power Pentium-M CPUs that are only 32bit. So, basically a die-shrunk P3. They aren't 20 years old yet, but boy are they obsolescent for any general purpose use. Don't worry, we're not going to add an "Intel Stealey/Atom" forum just yet. :-D

- Alex
 
ajacocks said:
I think the dividing line is (absent servers/embedded/industrial) if a machine has a PCIe bus or not. Now, PCIe is everything, before, we had AGP, EISA, MCA, ISA, VLB, etc.

To your point, too @Eudimorphodon, I'm not aware of any non-x86-64 "PC descendants" that are 32 bit and have PCIe. So, 32/64bit is a goot cut-off, too.

Given that, the first generation Intel Atom CPUs are arguably vintage, given that they are low-power Pentium-M CPUs that are only 32bit. So, basically a die-shrunk P3. They aren't 20 years old yet, but boy are they obsolescent for any general purpose use. Don't worry, we're not going to add an "Intel Stealey/Atom" forum just yet. :-D

- Alex
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There are a few sk478 P4 and sk479 Pentium-M boards with PCIE, but they are rare. I do think using 64 bit as a cut off is a good idea too but for me it's axp and piii that should be the cut off and I say that as someone who likes to play around with P4 systems.
 
HaHa I said:
There are a few sk478 P4 and sk479 Pentium-M boards with PCIE, but they are rare. I do think using 64 bit as a cut off is a good idea too but for me it's axp and piii that should be the cut off and I say that as someone who likes to play around with P4 systems.
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It does bug me a little that some systems sold in 2000-2004 would be on topic while other systems sold at the same time and functionally equivalent would not because of the CPU.
 
krebizfan said:
It does bug me a little that some systems sold in 2000-2004 would be on topic while other systems sold at the same time and functionally equivalent would not because of the CPU.
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This is why I like the idea of a outdated/obsolete category for older non vintage stuff.
 
vwestlife said:
No need to create a new forum. Just change "Pentium (2nd and 3rd generation)" to "Pentium (2nd generation and newer)". Considering that it's the least-used PC generation subforum, don't worry, it has the room to spare.
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i like this idea
 
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