Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> __/ [Marcus Fox] on Thursday 12 January 2006 03:30 \__
>
>> Watching a rather old documentary where they all have weird haircuts
>> and all the equipment looks like it came from a 70's sci fi movie.
>> The scientist is explaining his six feet computer. "This is the
>> world's most powerful computer. It can process 100 million
>> calculations per second", he says. By this I take it he means 100
>> MHz. Can anyone estimate for me the approximate year when this was
>> the top of the range processor?
> The number of clock cycles does not proportionally relate to the
> number of calculations. What do they mean by an "instruction"? What
> type of instruc- tion? What complexity and cost does it have ? How
> many bits does it have, thus how expressive is it?
>
> If it were a 100 MHz computer that's most powerful, you would
> possibly be looking at the early 80's or late 70's?? For home
> computing, 100 MHz prob- ably came about with the Pentiums in the
> early 90's, maybe 1992.
Under the DX 486 line they went to 66Mhz with the DX2 and IIRC there was
a DX4 that did 99, so a DX3 in reality. Their basic speed, like the
simple DX, was 33MHz and it was internal fiddling that upped the speed,
though I don't know how. The first Pentiums were at 90MHz I think and I
seem to remember general opinion at the time was that they weren't as
good as a DX4, but speed increased fairly rapidly, 120s then 133s pretty
quickly.
|
|
