Yes, I still use the same hard disk platter as a drink coaster. But I need more ISA cards in my collection.
Not just how it physically looks but, y'know, the vibes.
Athlon XP for me, easy.
Has enough instructions and addressing modes that it doesn't feel like a chore programming in it. (without macros/inventing your own calling convention. At least in this regard, MIPS had $at- an ABI defined assembler temporary- to construct more complex idioms.)
The Motorola 68K. No other processor can have its heart on fire as a result of hit Mega Drive title Alien Soldier.
Slot-1 P3 is a big chunky boy that can handle basically any old game I actually want to play
Slot 1 P3 always felt weird to me, felt like "P2 with a fresh coat of paint" and not much else. 370 feels like it was the actual, intended P3.
But I'm sure they're very functional now.
It was the first CPU I put into my first custom PC over ten years back. It only cost me $100 for a $600 build. Reviews back then called the entire CPU line trash and I'm pretty sure AMD faced a lawsuit due to false advertising.
For my needs though, it never gave me issues minus some launch bugs. Ran games quite well at the time, was easy to overclock, ran it on the stock CPU cooler no problem, and I got two visual novels developed and released on that system using that crappy CPU.
Using a newly built desktop nowadays (well, over a year old now) with an intel i5 12400 while I work on my third project. That old system with that old CPU is still being used to this day as my mother's current desktop for internet browsing, but I may take it back one day and turn it into a NAS.
I have the exact same experience with the FX line, personally I got an FX-8320E against everyone’s advice of getting a more expensive i3 instead. Sure it wasn’t the best but I think being able to get a GTX 760 instead of a 750 or something from AMD really made the most difference in most games.
amd k5. created because intel's engineers wouldn't listen to reason to and fix the glaring bugs in their maths.
Did the pentium bug directly influence the K5? That's a story I'd love to hear.
nah. it was the 486. before a single chip was printed amd's engineers sent a series of increasingly strongly worded warnings about a major flaw in the maths. intel ignored every single one. when amd turned out to be right intel kludged it by adding a math coprocessor and calling it the 486dx. the pentium had the same flaw as the 486 and they tried to correct it in the same way, math coprocessor.
amd completed all existing contracts for intel but that was it. no more subcontracting. they fixed the problem the correct way and as a result the k5 performed so well that they immediately captured enough of the market to be a major competitor.
i should probably rephrase. yes, the pentium bug did directly influence the k5. also, the pentium bug is a misnomer. it's the 486 bug, really. it was baking in their system for nearly a decade before someone actually solved it correctly which they only did after they cheated off of amd's homework. which they didn't need to do. they could have just read literally any paper amd sent them. it's not like they were hiding their work or anything. lmao
the hubris of intel gave us amd.
The Athlon 64 because that was the peak case-modding years with UV active plastic, cold cathode lights, all kinds of fan control drive bay accessories and the motherboards in a rainbow of colors before everything became black and RGB.
Oh yeah, I remember that era well. I associate it with the P4 because that's what I had at the time, but let's be real: the P4 was the heart of the grey era dell shitboxes, and the A64 was for the Gamers.
I had a DFI board back then and UV plastics need to come back. Way better than this RGB nonsense.
if only for nostalgia's sake, i have some FOND memories of gaming on an athlon 64x2 4800+ during circa 2011 to 2014. GOOD times were had playing tf2, gmod, minecraft, portal 2, and skyrim on what-would-have-been a rad fucken gaming pc in 2006 shoved inside a compaq case with the worst airflow known to mankind. literally sounded like a vacuum cleaner.
The Sega Saturn's dual SH-2's. Hilarity in a design. We bolted an extra CPU on to compete with the PlayStation in a hurry and none of our software toolchain supports it for the longest time.
Pentium 4s from about 2001 onward. The earlier ones in that range had the Windows XP vibes but the later ones are funny. They're a bridge between the old IDE & AGP hardware into more modern stuff and feel anachronistic. Their motherboards have PCIe slots, SATA ports, gigabit ethernet, DDR2 slots, etc. while still being old enough to have PCI, IDE, serial+parallel ports, and a floppy drive connector. In addition, they'll happily run Windows XP with ease (since that's what they're designed for) and can even unhappily run modern Linux and Windows 10 even more unhappily.
I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre from 2004 with a later P4 in it and I care about that machine enough to have bothered replacing a bunch of capacitors on the motherboard. I swapped the disc drive out with a fancy thing that takes a laptop optical drive and has two 2.5" hotswap bays. There's only one 5.25" bay and I still wanted an optical drive. It's funny to watch that thing struggle with modern OSes.
I installed Gentoo on it for laughs. It took 48 hours for the base install, even with a pre-compiled kernel to save time. Installing XFCE took another 24 hours, then installing some more software on top of that took another 3 days. I love that machine. Can talk about it for hours
The Power PC Architecture, but specifically the 750 line. That little beast ran everything from the GameCube, Macs, or a few space projects that I programmed that I am really not supposed to talk about except in vague terms.
The Pentium 4 Prescott which ran so ridiculously hot that the cheapskates at Dell got stuck putting 20 square feet of copper on top of it. My parents had one for the longest time. After we threw it out I learned from a CE professor that it was intel's last major attempt to get netburst working (there was a later die shrink but not much more)
Yup! Cedar Mill (the 65nm die shrink) wasn't actually that bad and got the heat back under control but Intel realized they weren't on the right path by then and were already shifting gears. They overclocked pretty good too, if you could deal with the heat!
My first CPU was also a Prescott and realizing it kinda sucked pushed me a bit into learning more about CPUs to not make that mistake again lol
Can’t decide the actual line because I don’t really care, but just the entire AVR architecture. Gimme 8-bit RISC. Yes I would like 32 8-bit registers. Yes a shift by 8 bits is just architectural register renaming. Fun to program.
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