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> most successful CPU, like the Pentium > spectacular lemons, like the Pentium
2:36 i686? The most successful CPU architecture of all time? A lemon?
Thanks for this, this brought an understanding of CPU functionality historically I never had. I remember being confused by the marketing of the Pro back in the day.
Having used and sold quite a few P-Pro systems back in the days, it was a really fantastic CPU for workstation and server use. Especially the 1MB models did really well in 4-socket boards running heavy workloads like an Oracle database or media transcoding. It was significantly overpriced for regular desktop use.. but then, nobody uses a modern Xeon in their gaming PC either.
Any connection to the Sirius cybernetics corporation?
I've got a pair of Pentium Pros somewhere :P
Bla bla bla X86 bus lanes. Other chip architectures exist. Well how many pins per a core don't end in series 86 in a cisc or risc chipset?🤔
There was the 8008 & 6502 I guess.
Wow. This video really brings back a lot! I was working at a Kinkos in the mid 90s and it was a huge cross section of older mainframe guys who never moved past Fortran and younger guys working in computer services in the process of getting their CS degrees. I'm sure I had more than a few spirited convos about the Pent Pro! But for sure the whole upshot was that, while it was supposed to be for 32-bit, Intel was naïve to assume that the NT ecosystem would be ready for it. It wasn't the casual users that really got the shaft, but the smaller business users who assumed that they could just run anything on the Pro
I used Linux back then, but with AMD (5x86->K5->K6) and later also ARM CPUs.
I "upgraded" from a Pentium 133 MHz to a Pentium Pro 200 MHz in the mid-90s, but was too young to know the difference between the two. My machines were mostly for gaming. Did some home office tasks, running Windows 95. My next two CPUs were AMD and seemed to run much faster on Windows Me and XP.
@3:10 PentiumPro wasn't first, NextGen 5x86 was first x86 with RISC core. (about half year earlier). Also i think it was not a full lemon, at this times i worked in pc building company and at server market (Windows NT) it been adopted widely, but only there ;)
It kinda lives on today since the "core 2" archtecture is almost a copy-paste of the pentium 3 with some tweaks. The "core i" is basically the same thing with HT. Only the most recent intels changed enough that you can say is something different, but at what extent? I don't think theres ever been a change quite like it was from 486 to the pentium pro. It was a fundamental change. Today's it seems more like tweaks upon tweaks.
I dunno who these people are that supposedly considered the Pentium Pro a lemon. First I've heard of such malarky.
Thanks for a really informative video, as always.
my only experience was with linux and it performed really well
It worked with Linux just brilliantly.
I remember running linux on these chips. It was very fast. I had a quad CPU system at the time. But, it wasn't just fast. It helped to heat my house!
The more I've learned about the BBC Micro, I must say it had some admirable design elements. This coming from an American who's used and programmed computers since about 1982, and has been a fan of Atari computers for many years. Speaking of which, Atari computers had a CP/M expansion available from SWP Microcomputer Products, called the ATR8000. It was a whole separate box that had a Z80 CPU, its own memory, and I/O ports for adding industry-standard disk drives, modems, and printers. The way it worked was it turned the Atari into an 80-column terminal into the ATR box, which was accessed through the Atari's SIO port. This allowed Atarians to run CP/M, and compatible software. Though, with such expansions, one could easily wonder, "Why not just buy a whole separate CP/M machine," since all it really lacked was a keyboard and display hardware. I looked at some sample BBC Basic recently that showed it had much higher-resolution graphics capabilities than the other 8-bit computers I knew from the era, while still being able to display multiple colors. I've looked at GW-Basic on the PC, and it looks to me like BBC Basic is comparable in features. Thanks for covering the topic of "PC-compatible-ish." I remember those PCs, and I didn't understand the point of them at the time, "Why get a 'PC-compatible' if you can't be confident it will work with all PC software?" Your explanation helped me understand why they existed (they had Intel hardware, just not exact to that of the PC), and the appeal of such a machine, particularly if you had a list of compatible software, so you could assess whether it was the right choice for you. Once the PC BIOS was reverse-engineered, though, all bets on "PC-compatible-ish" were off, because why bother?
more like Pentium Lame
I must have lived in a parallel universe, where PPro was regarded as a wonder powerhouse, a machine to dream about. This is the first time I heard someone calling it lemon.
Where i worked in 1997, our main software dev platform for 3d rendering software was the PPro and NT4. It was pretty good but still out paces by our Alpha NT4 boxes. Ultra SPARC and PARISC out paces both but alot of our customers insisted on running windows, and in the end windows won the market share.
Windows XP was released well into the Pentium III's life - and well last the Pentium II. Most of those platforms started with Windows 98. Heck, even the Pentium 4 was released in 2000. Not to say people didn't run XP on Pentium III systems, but I'd say very few Pentium IIs were running it.
I think it would've been a nice ending to explain that after the mis-step that was the Netburst architecture for Pentium 4 that Intel returned to a P6-based architecture with the original Core CPUs
Only me wondering why not loading the 4 bytes into eax then bit and with 0xff000000 to check the highest byte, then left shift 8 bit and recheck. By that all operation is fully 32bit and still loading the whole 32 but in one go (although need to handle unaligned access first)
With a click-bait title like that, you must really get a kick out of blustery hate-filled comments. 👹
I remember at work there was a PentiumPro workstation which was used for video edition. It came with w95 and it was an unstable lemon. But the rig also came with nt4 workstation. I installed nt4 and then this computer ran vert stable and fast
Imagine explaining this to a manager who couldn't understand why their shiny new PPro running NT was having a dog of a time with all those 16-bit apps. :) They didn't get it.
the constant background music makes this great content really annoying for me, sorry.
The PS5 is over 10 Teraflops, just to give the classic funny context to how fast the computers have become.
We had a dual Pentium Pro server in our house. Thing was a beast!
Fabulous video mate! Thank you.
I consider the Pentium Pro the spiritual ancestor to the Xeon.
I don't remember this running poorly. I had a pentium pro 150 overclocked to 180 and thought it ran great. Win 95 and dos gaming.
I had a dual pentium pro as my main desktop for about 7 years. I ran NT and win2k on it and I loved it.
Now we're on high res high refresh rate OLED displays, soon enough we'll be using holographic displays.
The pentium pro is Intels greatest CPU. But I am biased. My uncle designed most of the I/O for that cpu
I remember upgrading my Pentium 75MHz with a 133MHz Pentium Pro. First CPU I ever used that had to have a fan on it. I thought it was such a great upgrade back then. Has it really been almost 30 years now? Seems like yesterday....
Great description! Thank you!
Pentium Pro wasn't a lemon. Remember the first versions of the Pentium at 60mhz and 66mhz were expressive and ran hot plus had that division bug. Perhaps more problematic than the Pentium Pro. Which in its next revision as the Pentium II was a huge success. The Pentium wasn't huge until its next revision as well.
My experience with P-Pros was I was trying to save up for a PC in the mid 90s and someone from my church wanted to sell his Pentium Pro PC to me. When I mentioned the issue of running 16-bit DOS code , he showed off a DOS game on it. It ran...OK but it felt more like an early Pentium than a newer one. For professional workstations running NT it's great! But most people at home were still running 16-bit Windows applications and DOS games so that was the wrong market.. . ... Until the Pentium II made it all a mote point and I ended up getting one for my new PC.
It was the same story for the first 64bit processors
The 8 and 16 bit performance did indeed suck on the Pentium Pro but it was thankfully offset by the huge amount of L2 cache in the same package at full processor clock rate. That L2 cache also made it sing on 32 bit code. In particular were the models with 1 MB of L2 cache at 200 Mhz. The Pentium 2/3 moved the L2 cache externally to the CPU and ran at a divider from the processor clock. For a handful of of tasks, the fastest Pentium Pros could out run the first Pentium 2 chips despite having higher clocks because of the differences in the L2 cache. This is the same reason why Coppermine Pentium 3's were seen as superior to some Katmai Pentium 3's despite having less L2 cache over all. 4 way SMP support was also a huge factor in the Pentium Pro's early success. Often at the time, workstations were only sold with a single CPU but had unpopulated sockets for upgrades down the road. This was seen as a good upgrade path, even compared to the first wave of Pentium 2 systems. As for pricing, these chips and complete systems weren't cheap but they definitely undercut various RISC competitors by a lot. I will say that while technically possible, running Linux on a Pentium Pro wasn't that popular at the time of its release: only the 1.0 kernel had been release prior to the Pentium Pro's launch. Its popularity didn't explode until kernel 2.2 many years later and after Intel had moved onto Pentium 2 and 3. Granted Linux builds from the late '90s and early '00s would run perfectly fine on a Pentium Pro (and technically even some today given enough RAM and patience) but rather they were never really sold/installed together when the hardware was new and relevant.
that's sooooo much thermal paste!
Probably 20 years ago, I saved an e-waste Compaq Workstation with a Pentium Pro and Windows ME. I was surprised how well it ran with only 200 MHz.
Interesting video, but there's a lot of confused terminology in this, and some incorrect basic assumptions, probably stemming from the terminology confusion. Starting from the terminology. When we say "16-bit code" or "32-bit code" on x86, we don't mean that it uses the 16bit parts of the registers or only the 32-bit parts. We refer to the "mode" the CPU running the code in. Specifically the 8086-compatibility 16-bit "real mode" (in which we can still use 32bit registers), or the 32-bit "protected mode". Therefore, there is no such thing as "8-bit code" on x86. There is no x86 mode in which it emulates an 8080. The incorrect assumption is that a "pure" 32-bit program, or a well-written one, or one produced by a good compiler, will not use 'ax' or 'al'. That just not true. Doing 16-bit or 8-bit loads/stores/operations is unavoidable in many use cases, and not just something compilers used to do as a trick and no longer do. Current 64bit x86 code *will* use 8-bit and 16-bit parts of registers, it's a matter of semantics, not just performance tradeoffs. When you do arithmetic in "short"s in C or "char"s most of the time you're forcing the compiler to do that, and many times you have to, because of file format constraints, network packet formats, or just because you're dealing with text. Finally a couple of very minor points: 1. you said the p2 added "segment register caches", if by that you meant "segment descriptor caches", those existed since the 386. 2. Even thought most games until the late 90s ran on DOS, at that stage (since the early 90s) they usually were fully 32-bit, running in protected mode, usually by relying on a DOS extender like DOS/4GW to do so.
x86 can do unaligned reads just fine. Performance may vary, but it works fine.
I worked quite a bit in Sonic Foundry Acid on a ppro 200, it was nice and snappy. It actually ran that program better than my k6-2 (333?) did.
I still have a dual PPro 200 server in the office lmao. Still works fine though it's turned off 90% of the time. Was running it as a mail server until 4 or 5 years ago. 😂
To be fair, the Pentium Pro had it's 256K (or even 512K) L2 cache integrated and running at full CPU speed. Probably this has reduced the "flushing" penalty quite a bit.
"all in all, the P6 architecture had a production lifespan of 12 years" Not true. The successor to the Pentium M was re-branded as the "core solo/duo". to distract from the fact that intel was abandoning the Pentium 4's Netburst micro-architecture and going back to the older P6 micro-architecture. The line was re-branded again after the core 2 into intel's modern core i3/i5/i7 line and is still going to this day. The P6 is probably the single most successful micro-architecture of all time. It's still going strong 29 years later as the "P core" in intel's current CPUs, with generations of incremental improvements. Even more notable is that the P6 micro-architecture was so good that most modern high-performance micro-architecture are essentially copies of it, not only AMD's Zen architecture, but Apple's entire line of arm cores and the more recent cores from ARM inc too.
First server I ever set up after college was a Compaq Proliant with dual Pentium Pro 200Mhz and I believe it had 256 MB of RAM.