What do y'all like about the Pentium one?

[Quagmire]

Make no mistake, as it was Doom in the early 90's that instilled the desire for faster and more reliable hardware. Folks couldn't get enough of blowing the crap out of aliens and whatever. It was a great beginning to the FPS gaming era. Then, in the early 2000's, Crysis surfaced and you had to have a good if not great build to run it. Of course, Aunt Milly was still poking away at WP and Uncle Ben was busy with his spreadsheets and as long as the printer worked, and didn't jam, they didn't care much about how fast their machine was. Maybe in the workplace it was slightly different but they didn't care much for Voodoo or Radeon, etc. BTW, my first 19" non-interlaced color CRT monitor cost $599.95 back around the mode 90's. It was gorgeous and weighed a ton.

 

[krebizfan]

The integrated video was typically limited to 1024x768. Video cards to reach higher resolutions and wide screens were popular for business. The increased speed of video cards didn't hurt. XP was very slow using i810 video; inserting an old surplus PCI video card made the system much better. Businesses may not have been buying the fastest card at the time but enough low power chips were moved to keep unit costs low.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

If you are looking for a dualy,

I'm not looking for one so much as I just happen to want one. SMP is fun.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

In short, VLB was really a 93 thing too, perhaps tale end of 92, What was the first VLB board BTW? You probably had a 486DX2-66 with maybe a Locked-in Local Bus video card if we are talking bleeding edge '92. Most still had TSING 4000 (spelling) on ISA.

I never had a VLB system during the time they were popular. I picked up one in the late 90s on the cheap, forgot what video card it had in it though. It played all of my DOS games great and had an Am5x86-133. A cheap nasty power supply took it out when it detonated in all of its chineseium glory.

Currently have one motherboard with VLB slots that I pulled out of a DTS sound unit that I scrapped. Don't have a VLB video card for it yet, just a VLB disk controller card. Has one of those strange IBM 486SLC2 chips at 50 MHz on it.

Well in the context of the thread, I didn't think it needed the prefix: "In PC architecture" "dawn of dual cpu systems, (that weren't some crufty version of UNIX/NT only)." Everything you mention is not really a standard.

Let's try and unpack this a bit. So your definition of a "Standard multiprocessing PC" is a PC that doesn't require "some crusty version of Unix or Windows NT only". So by your definition, multiprocessing PCs never existed and still don't exist. Windows has been on the NT kernel since Windows 2000. Or do you mean Windows 2000 and later because the NT moniker was dropped? Or because it was the first version of Windows that had out of the box multiprocessing support without having to faff with custom HALs and drivers?

That's just a nonsensical oxymoron that seems to rely on Microsoft's blessing for a hardware configuration to exist.

There was never a version of DOS or Windows based on DOS that supported multiprocessing. It *required* Windows NT, Unix, Linux or some other operating system to work. There was no single standard, and there still isn't.

If you are looking for a dualy, 430NX and later 430HX are your options from Intel. While the later HX is better, It was never top end, as it was in the PPro era, so are few and far between. NX systems are fine but Period correct is like 133MHz chips, so they are often limited in CPU support, They certainly for-fill the interesting criteria. They are not cheap, but are findable.

Might be able to use one of those Evergreen Spectra interposers to get dual K6/2 400s.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Might be able to use one of those Evergreen Spectra interposers to get dual K6/2 400s.

No, you cannot. The K6 doesn’t support Intel’s MP standard, which relies on the internal local APIC. At all. Full stop.

There was no single standard, and there still isn't.

This is flaming ignorance on display. I linked the Intel MPS standard earlier, and that page I turned up later that listed what MP architectures were supported by SCO UNIX (listing a few proprietary 386 examples) specifically cites Intel APIC/MPS as “generic” support. So yes, there was no single *implementation*, but by 1994 there was only one *standard*.

MPS was the first Intel-blessed multi-vendor standard for SMP with Intel CPUs, and AMD licensed it for the Opteron and later CPUs. Proprietary methods were still in play for very large shared memory systems and the MPS table system for enumeration has been displaced by ACPI, but the local APIC method for bus arbitration is still used today. (Intel calls the current version “x2APIC”.)

 

[Eudimorphodon]

AMD licensed it for the Opteron and later CPUs

Just to correct myself here, it was the Athlon *MP* that hardware-wise was essentially a direct copy of how Intel CPUs did bus arbitration. The Opteron is where AMD got rid of the direct FSB and shoved everything through Hypertransport, introducing NUMA to the mainstream PC world…

but ultimately the point here is there *is* a standard now for defining how multiple CPUs “look” to an x86 OS. All modern systems and OSes use ACPI for describing the functional layout of the cores and APICs in a system, but it evolved directly from the MPS specification from the 90’s and legacy BIOSes supported MPS 1.4 for a long time, at least through most of the 2000-aughts.

 

[Perico]

Pentium 1 are great systems. They mark the transition from old-era artisan-made 486 rigs, to more modern, streamlined, PCI-bus based systems with much more RAM than 486-motherboards could ever dream of.

Rendering a JPG file on a 486 was painful. With a Pentium 1, it was suddenly a nice thing to do.

 

[Zare]

Oo thanks for that comment, now I recall time spent just looking at random images, my absolute favourite program was PVE for DOS, it had DOS-Shell EGA like browser and supported a ton of graphics formats.

Actually missed that piece of software so much, it was probably the first case of nostalgia, in early 2000s I tried to find in on the Internet and found it on Simtel.

 

[Quagmire]

Pentium 1 are great systems. They mark the transition from old-era artisan-made 486 rigs, to more modern, streamlined, PCI-bus based systems with much more RAM than 486-motherboards could ever dream of.

Rendering a JPG file on a 486 was painful. With a Pentium 1, it was suddenly a nice thing to do.

They were. But the only problem was it was hard to afford back then. I could build almost a complete PC from scratch for what that chip cost when first released. Eventually though, I wound up with a string of Pentiums of one flavor or the other.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

But the only problem was it was hard to afford back then.

That was then. This is now

 

[Quagmire]

I accept that, I wouldn't put $ on my opinion. You could be more right than I am, I still think AMD's going for it to take Intel's market share, not to keep that segment of market thriving/alive. In future, if they split market share, we could see how "x86 vendors" are treating the computing market as a category, as right now the 'internal' competition gets more important for both.

But it's not only them who get the say. It's actually less their say, than MS and other software giants, cause they decide how computers are used. Millions of computers were sold in history, just so somebody could run Microsoft Office. Millions. From now on that product won't be installable, it's to be a remote service you don't need a PC at all to connect to.



Let's not forget the state of OS and browser in average installation in that period. Tons of software in StartUp, desktop loaded but hard disk screeching, clicks not registering, in 30s ICQ appears, then another 30 for MSN, and so on...and that's all before Explorer and ActiveX kicks in.

And that would be on clean install with just few most popular Internet apps installed, add in the OEM bloat on a typical retail machine, yeah it's a P3 alright to have any sort of decent user experience in those circumstances.

Seems to me, the industry pushed a lot to move this prudence and maintenance cost from clueless users to vendors. Good example would be WHQL and drivers via update channel. I had 'fixed' so many machines back in the day by just normally installing drivers - the regular user would put in a CD and hit install in autorun menu. Rinse and repeat for a few devices and now the system is full of resident software bloat that's not needed to run the hardware at all. But people did not know that.

I wouldn't write off Intel just yet. They'll bounce back. They presently have some internal management problems which are hampering development. Their topline CPU's are as fast as AMD's sans the extended X3D cache, which caught them by the short hairs, but they'll come around. I like Intel but for the time being, prefer the AMD performance factors. Looking back, 10 years ago, the Intel 6900K and the Nvidia 1080 were hallmark changes to gaming along with the Z170 platform and its chips. With the Z170 you could actually upgrade the BIOS without a CPU or memory installed with the board simply plugged in to the supplied wi-fi antenna. Look for Intel to be sold to a yet undisclosed buyer here in the near future.

 

[mR_Slug]

Has one of those strange IBM 486SLC2 chips at 50 MHz on it

Now that sounds like one of the best VLB HDD controllers. I'm assuming SCSI. Photo would be cool. I was reading period reviews about caching controllers. There were comparisons to just using dos caching and some claimed that apart from slow ISA, they weren't worth the cost. But around that time there were a huge load of caching controllers and raid cards coming on the market (compared to like 91).

This offloading tasks to other dedicated CPU, seems to go round in a technology circle. For a few years, there's lots of hype about dedicated cpu add-ons, then there's hype about integrating things back in to core system architecture. Intel's integrated graphics architecture for example. There's pro and cons to both ideas in principle. But it's interesting about different ideas/solutions through the ages. Interesting to have more info on this card and VLB caching controllers in general. I've not really researched them much.

"some crusty version of Unix or Windows NT only". So by your definition, multiprocessing PCs never existed and still don't exist.

I don't think I said this. My definition of a standard PC(in the context of SMP), is loosely, will it run a standard version of (insert version of windows with multi-CPU support). Today maybe replace windows with windows or linux. The installation media for any version of NT (as far as I remember) had some additional HALs, but they are for nonstandard systems. Perhaps "Dawn" was the wrong term, mainstreaming? though that's perhaps not right. For example I have a max 2MB RAM card from 82'83? Think it's called something like the J-ram. As far as I'm aware, its the first EMS-like card for the PC, but AFAIK don't think anything actually supports it. SGI 540, Awesome workstation, but non-standard, and limited support. I'm not knocking these systems, just pointing out they are often poorly supported compared to the mainstream architecture. I'm on the lookout for a system that's based on the Intel xPress platform, that AFAIK is Intels first dual CPU x86 platform. I'm not saying they don't exist, (other that it appears that way if you're looking for one). just that they are non-standard. If you want to run linux on say a 4 cpu AcerFrame 3000MP, it's not going to be plug and play.

Might be able to use one of those Evergreen Spectra interposers to get dual K6/2 400s.

This may work on the Compaq Proliant 2000/4000. In short, same motherboard, 2000= 2 cpu, 4000 = 4 CPU. Takes 4x P60s think it can do 4x socket5 too. Each CPU has its own RAM, so hopefully the CPU thinks it's on its own. I have no idea if it would work, I've been looking for one for a bit...

They were. But the only problem was it was hard to afford back then. I could build almost a complete PC from scratch for what that chip cost when first released.

This is where most people were. I had an aging 25MHz SX 486 at this time. In 95 a socket 3 board with something from AMD was still a capable system. Think it was about '97 before I had an AMD DX4-100, I was cheap with pocket money. So this was arguably roughly the time the 486 was dead, but I FINALLY had a computer that could run 95. And only 4 years later I'd bought a quad PPro system. Because, well, err...yes. Now if I could just find a second RAM card for it, its only been 20 years.


Another thing with the Pentium 1 era of '93-97, was the popularization of the WWW. There's a lot of academics who got to use the internet at university's, and a lot of people who got started with BBS before this period. However I would say for the vast majority this was probably the first time the average joe was using a modem. Beginning of browser wars, anti-trust etc.

Anyway back to the OP's question, If you find a 430VX system boring, early Pentium systems are more interesting because of the unusual architectures. If you have any sanity at all get a standard Pentium. If you're in the market for early pre-socket-5 multiprocessing x86 systems. welcome to the lunatic asylum.

 

[computerdude92]

So I want to know, what do you like about the Pentium one

For one, I like how the later motherboards can be flexible about CPU options. I put a Pentium 100 into a Compaq Presario 5304 with a Super Socket 7 mobo. It originally had a MII 300 CPU. I miss that system. It had beautiful sounding onboard ESS Solo-1 MIDI. The Erana's Staff Dream MIDI in Quest for Glory 4 made me tear up it sounded so pretty. ;-)

I also like how the TV ADs for the P1 look. They are nice looking just like the ADs for other Intel CPUs from the 90's.

Intel: The Computer Inside!