Best CPU's of all time?

There's a lot of 'list all the processors you owned' in this thread, rather than just listing the most impressive CPUs of all time from an objective perspective.
 
My favorite chip of all time was the AMD K6-III

I had a K6-III 450 on an EPOX MVP3E board with 1Meg of L3 cache.
All I was playing at the time was Quake 2 and with the 3dnow patch that chip was sweet.
 
Easily the 700MHz Pentium IIIs. They overclocked well, you could pair them up without paying through the nose, and the ABIT VP6 was the all-time best board to stick them on. Best processor(s) I ever owned.

Quick edit: those 700MHz PIII were monsters, I took them up to 1001MHz on Golden Orbs.
 
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I don't have a top ten, but man, I loved my AMD T-bird something fierce.

It was the first time I could play CS over 20fps. That impressed me!
 
i7 920 D0...words can not describe....
the q6600 was a great chip as well now that I think about it....great bang/buck.
 
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I am, even with my age and years of working with computers, going to say Core i7, yes something modern. This is when everything converged and a new chapter was turned in computerdom. The i7 contained so many enhancements it was astounding. I thought the Penryn/Wolfdale contained a lot of change, but when these enhancements were part of Nehalem my eyes went o-O.
 
Shikami said:
I am, even with my age and years of working with computers, going to say Core i7, yes something modern. This is when everything converged and a new chapter was turned in computerdom. The i7 contained so many enhancements it was astounding. I thought the Penryn/Wolfdale contained a lot of change, but when these enhancements were part of Nehalem my eyes went o-O.
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Well said. I've been tickering with and building computers for over a decade and feel the same about the i7.
 
Shikami said:
I am, even with my age and years of working with computers, going to say Core i7, yes something modern. This is when everything converged and a new chapter was turned in computerdom. The i7 contained so many enhancements it was astounding. I thought the Penryn/Wolfdale contained a lot of change, but when these enhancements were part of Nehalem my eyes went o-O.
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Thats just a bit of an exaggeration. Besides if thats your reasoning it would make more sense to choose conroe. Now that was a big jump in terms of technology. The change from netburst alone should put conroe above nehalem in terms of tech enhancements for intel.
 
Disposed said:
Thats just a bit of an exaggeration. Besides if thats your reasoning it would make more sense to choose conroe. Now that was a big jump in terms of technology. The change from netburst alone should put conroe above nehalem in terms of tech enhancements for intel.
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The i7 is in no way as much of a change over Core 2 as Core 2 was to all the Netburst processors.
 
The 486 doesn't belong on the best processors of all time list. What for? It was practically a 386 with an integrated FPU, which was not used by most software and not included in some 486 models.

The 386 introduced 32-bit processing and hardware support for multitasking, and it had an optional non-integrated FPU,
 
For me, the modern computing creme de la creme goes as follows:

celeron 300A - I made the mistake of paying more for the P3-450...which cost twice as much, and was only marginally faster
k7-1000 - more of a milestone, really. But the awe of 1Ghz was pretty amazing back then
P4 2.4c (never owned one, but this was really the only netburst chip worth its sand)
Barton-M - the whole mobile line was amazing value, and may never be beat from a price-performance perspective. Simply an amazing OCer
Conroe C2Ds - tremendous OCers right out of the box, and simply outclassed everything before them while at stock speeds. This is personally my longest tenured processor(have had it since release, and still going strong...that's what, like 4 years?!). Simply amazing.
 
Dan_D said:
The i7 is in no way as much of a change over Core 2 as Core 2 was to all the Netburst processors.
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Exactly. Conroe was just huge compared to everything before it (Before you even considered the massive OC potential) i7 is just a minor upgrade from that.

I think some people get caught up in how fast their current stuff is and forget or something, i7 is great but it has no place whatsoever in this list.
 
similar story for me nardman, I also made the mistake of paying too much for a P2-400, instead of the celeron. But still, it was a powerful CPU that lasted me more than two years.

opinion of the CPU's I've owned:

- 8088 (family pc): Everybody who had a PC back then had this CPU, so this is a classic.
- Pentium (90mhz): Was the bang for the buck champion when Win95 launched.
- Pentium MMX (233mhz): not impressed at all. Don't think the MMX part was ever used.
- Pentium-2 (400mhz): Much better than Pentium-MMX.
- Athlon Thunderbird (1.2ghz): Broke the 1Ghz barrier and lasted almost 3 years.
- Pentium 4C Northwood (2.8ghz). Northwood was the only P4 worth my money. The older ones were too slow and Prescott....well...I didn't want a thermonuclear reactor in my PC!
- Core 2 Duo Conroe ([email protected]). A monster. After more than 3 years there's still no need to replace it.
 
Disposed said:
The pentium D 805 is the only one even worth mentioning because it did 4Ghz on air and was dirt cheap otherwise it was all garbage. Im not sure what he thinks made it mainstream? Maybe price? Only machines i ever saw this chip in belonged to overclockers and overclockers are pretty much the exact opposite of mainstream.
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The 805 is why I mentioned the Pentium D.
 
I loved that 300a celery. Best bang for the buck ever! Where else in the cpus life have we seen a processor that could double itself without issues on stock cooling?
 
PII 400mhz loved it
p III 800eb what a great performer
t-bird 800s were also nice to me
p4 2.8c i got some massive scores in 3dmark with it (was in top 5 here on [H] at one point)
c2d e6600
c2d e8400 <- still running that no performance issues with all games at 1920x1200 pure work horse for the buck. granted its at 4.25ghz with 500mhz quad pumped fsb runs 24/7 for 1.7 years now. and even though i could use an upgrade i dont need it!
 
Thats just a bit of an exaggeration. Besides if thats your reasoning it would make more sense to choose conroe. Now that was a big jump in terms of technology. The change from netburst alone should put conroe above nehalem in terms of tech enhancements for intel.
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Apparently, form this post and one or two others, not that many know of the changes that were made on the Core i7. There were a lot. All you have to do is look up the presentation. I will name some: unaligned SSE support, higher support of fused micro-ops, support of fused micro-ops in 64 bit mode, SSE 4.2, optimized loops within the pipeline, changes to the OoO engine, QuickPath Interconnect, integrated memory controller at 3x64bits, Hyper-Threading, PCU, Turbo boost, better VT-x. These should be obvious, but some are not obviously known. Now add the 45nm Core 2 changes that were made: Super Shuffle Engine, Fast Radix-16 Divider, Store Forward, and improved OS Synchronization Primitive Performance.

So, there were many changes and a new chapter. Conroe was really nice, but missing some great innovations that came later.
 
Shikami said:
Apparently, form this post and one or two others, not that many know of the changes that were made on the Core i7. There were a lot. All you have to do is look up the presentation. I will name some: unaligned SSE support, higher support of fused micro-ops, support of fused micro-ops in 64 bit mode, SSE 4.2, optimized loops within the pipeline, changes to the OoO engine, QuickPath Interconnect, integrated memory controller at 3x64bits, Hyper-Threading, PCU, Turbo boost, better VT-x. These should be obvious, but some are not obviously known. Now add the 45nm Core 2 changes that were made: Super Shuffle Engine, Fast Radix-16 Divider, Store Forward, and improved OS Synchronization Primitive Performance.

So, there were many changes and a new chapter. Conroe was really nice, but missing some great innovations that came later.
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Comparing the innovations behind i7 and conroe is assinine. i7 is only a minor upgrade from conroe in comparison to what conroe was to everything before it. Its a good chip to be sure but its nowhere near as innovative compared to what conroe was.

Conroe brought a whole new architecture to the table and i7 is built on top of that architecture. You can list all the features you want but like i said before the move from netburst alone makes the conroe chip far more innovative than the i7, without that there would be no i7.

Everything since conroe has been a revision of some sort. Underneath all those fancy features you list is conroes innovations making it all possible.
 
First off, it is asinine, and second you are proving how ignorant you are of both architectures. Also, your argument is nothing but asinine. The i7 has major changes that literally started a new chapter in computing and all the architectures are following in the path that was created.

After this presentation (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...hu2_CQ&usg=AFQjCNHDALADX4T1IoT-MjPLuO_dajDqSg) I clicked a few times at Newegg. Conroe was a change, but much of the legacy architecture stayed. It was nice, but it was not a real change. It is simple and beyond that I cannot argue with your ignorance.

I understand what you are saying, but you don't see the whole picture.
 
Shikami said:
First off, it is asinine, and second you are proving how ignorant you are of both architectures. Also, your argument is nothing but asinine. The i7 has major changes that literally started a new chapter in computing and all the architectures are following in the path that was created.

After this presentation (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...hu2_CQ&usg=AFQjCNHDALADX4T1IoT-MjPLuO_dajDqSg) I clicked a few times at Newegg. Conroe was a change, but much of the legacy architecture stayed. It was nice, but it was not a real change. It is simple and beyond that I cannot argue with your ignorance.

I understand what you are saying, but you don't see the whole picture.
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My ignorance? You read a fucking marketing presentation and said "Ooh thats lots o' stuff".

Its a nice change and has a pretty looking feature list but the change from netburst architecture to core was about 10x what this change has brought.

Even looking at simple performance the change from current tech to i7 is relatively small. When conroe was introduced it slaughtered EVERYTHING available previously.
 
Disposed said:
Even looking at simple performance the change from current tech to i7 is relatively small. When conroe was introduced it slaughtered EVERYTHING available previously.
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I can't disagree to this. Conroe brought things to the table that wasn't possible with the previous architectures, and Intel demonstrated how a real dual should be with the Conroes, instead of slapping two Pentium 4 cores making it the Pentium D. It was a massive leap from what the previous offerings Intel had and at the time "slaughtered EVERYTHING available".
 
I think the 80386 CPU was probably the most important CPU of all time, its instruction set remained mostly unchanged until we got to the Athlon 64... and even then the original 386 instruction set is still in there somewhere even on the latest i7 CPU's
 
Hey I like intel - but they didn't make the best processors for most of their lifetime. Some have mentioned the Motorola 68K.

But one of the most influential and best performing processor architecture was the Dec Alpha. These things just open a can of whoop ass on almost anything else in the 90's. It took the PC world years to catch up as it was 64bit and had clock speeds that were unbelievable in its era..

I can tell you this if you ever take some programming classes you won't be so fond of these x86 parts. They suffer from a severe lack of elegance..
 
brucedeluxe169 said:
wha??? prescott got spanked by athlon 64.....

northwood on the other hand.... that was a damn fine cpu for its time (vs athlon xp)
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99% of the posts in this thread are simply what people have owned and have nothing to do with being the "best of all time".
 
FLECOM said:
I think the 80386 CPU was probably the most important CPU of all time, its instruction set remained mostly unchanged until we got to the Athlon 64... and even then the original 386 instruction set is still in there somewhere even on the latest i7 CPU's
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Yeah

8086 (what was in an IBM XT, right?) Important groundwork chip
the aforementioned DEC VAX and Alpha chips (I am a sysadmin for VAX/VMS systems...maybe a bit biased)
the 386 (as said above)
Pentium 60? (athough the ones without the floating point bug would be better...the first Pentium was a big, big performance jump over 486 setups...

To me, I loved the K6-2 / super socket 7. Used cheap PC66/PC100/PC133 RAM, much better bang/buck than a Pentium II. Sure, a PII was better at clock for clock, but for the PII price, you could buy a K6-2 with a 100-200mhz clock speed advantage that performed better in almost anything.

I liked the socket A Athlons as well. I ran a 750mhz T-bird for years. When I moved up to an Athlon XP, my wife ended up with the t-bird system with a $20 1.1ghz Duron in it. I gave it to my dad after that.

I JUST took the 1.1ghz duron system out of use in 2008. Was still running WinXP with 256MB of RAM tolerably...it just became too much of a maintenance issue with my dad using it...a bunch of spyware and it would run out of RAM.

So for me, a 1ghz socket A was probably the longest running system that remained useful.
 
My ignorance? You read a fucking marketing presentation and said "Ooh thats lots o' stuff".
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Now the one thing that is most trifling here the misunderstanding of my semantics. Note, in my post I said converged. "This is when everything converged and a new chapter was turned in computerdom." And also one thing to consider, some here like engineering sciences-so, again, I cannot help if you are ignorant to the facts.

One last rebuttal, because after this, my old fart ass can give a rats ass about arguing with children. Yes, Conroe had change, but it did not create a wake as what i7 has. It has changed the paradigm of how we measure processors of ANY kind. The Netburst architecture still had its legacy features within the Core 2 duo architecture. Mainly being the GTL+ bus and its architecture is actually somewhat limited in muticore support. Now do not miscomprehended me on this, the Core 2 Duo did have instruction dispatched to the cores, but not everything was perfectly asynchronous within the cores. One example, when most of system interrupts are going to a single core that it not very capable multicore support. This changed with Wolfdale somewhat and then was changed even more with Nahelem. When I saw the i7 hit 50,000+ interrupts I was completely shocked. It was truly a multicore beast. That was a new chapter at least in my understanding, and I cannot inform you otherwise because you rather argue through ignorance. So, hey, the best processor of all time and at this moment, IMO, is the Core i7. Nothing asinine about it.
 
Disposed said:
99% of the posts in this thread are simply what people have owned and have nothing to do with being the "best of all time".
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I mean, it's one thing to say that there are some exceptional chips you owned and list those, but just to list everything you've owned including the crappy ones kinda misses the point of the thread.

For instance, I owned an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester-939, one of the first dual cores. That's something significant. I also owned an Athlon X2 7850BE Kuma-AM2+. That's not significant at all, even though it's faster and better.

Not sure why I'm seeing so much Netburst stuff on here... best thing Netburst did was make Intel move to Conroe.
 
Disposed said:
99% of the posts in this thread are simply what people have owned and have nothing to do with being the "best of all time".
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What did you expect? How are people supposed to know a CPU was any good if they never owned the thing? But yes, the thread should be called "Best CPU you ever had".
 
I was highly interested in the alpha when it was king. Although I was very interested in the merced and that turned out to be a flop.
 
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