A Brief History of the Multi-Core Desktop CPU

[Theinsanegamer]

Is this a joke?: "The culmination of all these efforts resulted in what is regarded as one of the best single-core desktop CPUs of all time, the Intel Pentium IV processor with a clock frequency of up to 3.8GHz supporting 2 threads.“

Pentium 4 was smashed by Athlon if my memory serves me well. But I remember very well the bad comments about Pentium 4 at that time.

Yeah, not sure what they were smoking when that was written. Must have been the leftover eggnog.

Then pentium IVs got their arses collectively kicked. The athlon XPs were competitive with pentium IVs clocked half a ghz higher, and the athlon 64s obliterated them. The 3.8 GHz pentium IV was consistently about as fast as a athlon 64 3000+ (1.8 GHz) to 3200+(2.0 GHz).

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1543/10

Beating the athlon 64 3400+/4000+ would take intel nearly three years until conroe launched.

Disapointed that the multi core section didnt mentiont he utter disaster that was the pentium D, and it's bus thrashing issues that lead to its 140 watt parts getting stomped by AMD's 65 watt options.

 

[wiyosaya]

The bigger the hardware warehouse is, the more Microsoft Bloats Windohs to fill it.

FTFY.

 

[hover389]

Correction: the 10 core/20 thread cpus from intel were 10th gen not 11th gen

 

[Danny101]

FTFY.

Lol. Right.

 

[Ben Myers]

How could you forget multi-core systems, like an early DEC one I had with a pair of 200MHz Pentium Pros mounted on a processor card or numerous servers of the era with a pair of Pentium or Pentium Pro CPUs?

 

[BigRedPDX]

You got me thinking back to 2 decades ago. I was just building my first Pentium 4 machine back then with the first versions of water cooling. I remember it was a 533MHz FSB chipset and the Pentium 4 didn't have hyperthreading yet. It was less than a year after I made my machine when the 800MHz FSB came out and so did the hyperthreading on Pentium 4 as well. I had a Geforce 4 TI4200 and it was a fairly decent system for the time. The case was a Thermaltake Xaser III and it was over 50 lbs. They definitely don't make them like they used too, and I'm okay with that.

 

[BigRedPDX]

Yeah, not sure what they were smoking when that was written. Must have been the leftover eggnog.

Then pentium IVs got their arses collectively kicked. The athlon XPs were competitive with pentium IVs clocked half a ghz higher, and the athlon 64s obliterated them. The 3.8 GHz pentium IV was consistently about as fast as a athlon 64 3000+ (1.8 GHz) to 3200+(2.0 GHz).

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1543/10

Beating the athlon 64 3400+/4000+ would take intel nearly three years until conroe launched.

Disapointed that the multi core section didnt mentiont he utter disaster that was the pentium D, and it's bus thrashing issues that lead to its 140 watt parts getting stomped by AMD's 65 watt options.

Hyperthreading was virtual cores and not physical cores. At that time you would need a server board to run 2 physical cores. That really was the start of the multicore processor, though. I am surprised they left it out. That was a big deal when you could see 2 cores in your performance monitor.

 

[maxxcool7421]

Dear author .. you forgot the Pentium-D ..

 

[maxxcool7421]

And the IBM Power-4 ....