A trip down memory lane

[Unabomber]

Worth a good read, regarding the classic Pentium, and the 486.

http://www.ddj.com/184409160?pgno=19

In this day of where we consider 45 watts of power to be "cool" for a CPU, this little bit got me chuckling:

Burning Bright

The easiest and cheapest way to run a microprocessor faster is to use more current to charge and discharge its parasitic capacities ("capacity" as in resistance and inductance).

To get more current, lower-resistivity silicon is used, which simply means doping the silicon more heavily with impurities during the fabrication process. PC microprocessors once ran cool, but then the 486DX2/66 consumed 6 watts, and the 66-MHz Pentium 13 watts, 16 watts peak.

The Pentium is Intel's last cool desktop engine. Look for the "Hexium" (aka P6) to consume 25 watts or more. This is a result of Intel's continuing drive to narrow the performance margin between PCs and high-performance server/workstations.

 

[Tazman2]

The good old days!