NamelessPFG
Gawd
- Joined
- Oct 16, 2016
- Messages
- 893
Now here's a list that acknowledges the existence of non-x86 CPUs for a change!All those kids in here...
Best CPUs of all time in my opinion:
- Zilog Z80
One of the most influential CPUs which helped initiate the home computer revolution in the 1980s and is built into countless other devices. Produced from 1976-present.
- Motorola 68000
- DEC Alpha 21064
- AMD Athlon Thunderbird
This helped AMD win the race to 1 GHz
- undecided yet
You'd think the Z80 and 68000 would've warranted more consideration, given their historic proliferation; the only reason x86 took off, by contrast, is simply because modern computers are descended from the IBM 5150 Personal Computer in some form. Pretty much everyone else went Z80, 6502 (C64) or 680x0 (Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST, X68000).
Funny thing is, the Z80 and 68000 are still alive and well, if only because of the artificial monopoly that is the academic market for graphing calculators that TI has a death grip on and can still charge $100+ a pop for. TI-83/84 use the Z80, TI-89/92/Voyage 200 use the 68000.
I don't know about you, but Nehalem didn't feel like big enough of a jump to warrant immediately retiring a computer that I spent about $1,450 on at the time when talking my Q6600 build, which was maybe two years old at most at the time. It wasn't like going from the Athlon XP 1800+ to said Q6600, or from the K6-2 350 to said XP 1800+. It certainly wasn't the '90s/early 2000s, either, when it felt like we were getting double the clock speed every year, alongside new Direct3D and OpenGL standards for graphics cards to support.There was a huge jump between the Kentsfield Q6600 (released 1/2007) and Nehalem i7-920 (released 11/2008). Hyper-threading and the move to DDR3 were two of the larger ones. I dumped two Q6600 systems and replaced them with three i7-920 ones when Microcenter dropped them to $199 in early 2009. Not related to gaming performance but there were huge performance gains for DC projects as well. The i7-920 was a must upgrade from Q6600 IMO.
An yes, it was more like 2 years and 2 months between releases, I must have been looking at the i7-2700k's release date.
Then again, I don't have the money to change computers like underwear, as enthusiasts tend to do. If I'm buying a computer, it's built to last, and the fact that my Q6600 build keeps trucking to this day is a testament to its longevity for general use.
Besides, the games that really make a computer hurt for single-threaded CPU performance didn't show up until Nehalem was old news. PlanetSide 2 took a few more years to be announced, DCS still had independent Black Shark and Warthog modules instead of the unified World engine + add-on aircraft system they use now, BF3/BF4 and Squad were still years away, I wasn't gonna buy Rise of Flight when it was still retail price for just two planes...
It wasn't until all that stuff started dropping and PS2 had its CPU/GPU bottleneck indicator on the FPS counter that I realized how inadequate the Q6600 was, and given the time, that's why I run Haswell now.
Of course, the $200 i7-4770K Micro Center sale was pretty sweet, too. I haven't seen a sale that good since!