Computer History Question

[Deslumo]

When was the last time something as big as zen 2 happened?

[GDRRiley]

when the first amd64 bit CPUs came out

April 2003

[Samfisher]

Honestly, when the Intel Core series came out.  It was such a game changer and left AMD lurching around for what feels and probably was 10 years catching up.

[Skipple]

10 minutes ago, Deslumo said:

When was the last time something as big as zen 2 happened?

People may disagree with me here..

 

Zen2 wasn't all that big of a deal in terms of technology per-say. It wasn't a massive generational leap or anything. Yes, 7nm is nice and all, but I wouldn't call it a eye watering speed improvement over say a 8700K.

 

What it did do, is provide value. AMD's margins were such that they are able to undercut Intel and make a really good value chip for the average consumer at a price point that couldn't be matched. AMD also proved that they could be trusted to make reliable hardware and software on the CPU side. 

[GDRRiley]

1 minute ago, Skipple said:

People may disagree with me here..

 

Zen2 wasn't all that big of a deal in terms of technology per-say. It wasn't a massive generational leap or anything. Yes, 7nm is nice and all, but I wouldn't call it a eye watering speed improvement over say a 8700K.

if you aren't going of performance but features/revolutions to how we build chips I think zen 2 is fair

 

[Skipple]

2 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

if you aren't going of performance but features/revolutions to how we build chips I think zen 2 is fair

 

Could very well be true. I don't know enough about the manufacturing end to comment on that. 

[GDRRiley]

15 minutes ago, Skipple said:

Could very well be true. I don't know enough about the manufacturing end to comment on that. 

change from 1 big die to smaller is a huge change

[mr moose]

it happens all the  time. 

 

co processor

mmx

athlon

core

zen

??

 

 

 

 

[atxcyclist]

47 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

when the first amd64 bit CPUs came out

April 2003

 

That was huge, probably the biggest jump in consumer computing technology in the last 25 years. Breaking the 1ghz mark was pretty amazing, but 64-bit computing really was a massive shift.

[mr moose]

18 hours ago, mr moose said:

it happens all the  time. 

 

co processor

mmx

athlon

core

zen

??

 

 

 

 

Shit, I just worked out what the ?? is going to be:

 

14nm +++++++++++

[Roswell]

19 hours ago, Deslumo said:

When was the last time something as big as zen 2 happened?

What about Zen 2 is “big” to you in comparison to everything else in microprocessor history? 
 

In the grand scheme of things, Intel and AMD have been leapfrogging each other for decades and decades. I think this moment in time may be less significant than say earlier in the 2010s when AMD was the one stalling in performance. Sandy Bridge came out and just absolutely destroyed everything in its wake. I say this because back then, there actually were obscene differences in performance. Now it’s mainly just differences in price per core. There are IPC differences now, sure, but it’s close enough not to matter. Now it’s all about price and not the FX line being literally 50%+ slower than the competition.

[mr moose]

52 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Would say Zen 2 was big as it rocked intel, made more than 4 cores accessible on consumer hardware with good IPC not just on £1000 HEDT parts

 

4 cores have been accessible on consumer parts (even budget parts) for a lot longer than zen has been around.   My 3550 (2012) has 4 cores, and was a budget CPU and cost $213 on release.

[Roswell]

5 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

More than

Phenom II x6 SKUs were affordable and competitive at the time, but yeah, I guess that’s the only real example. Intel’s enthusiast chips were definitely outrageous early on, even more so with the silly board costs.

[mr moose]

18 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

More than

My 3550 replaced a phenom with "more than". And it was still a performance upgrade.

 

More cores is not an argument when you are talking about consumer hardware.  Given majority of consumer desktops can still adequately run on as little as 2, it's like trying to argue the necessity of turbo charger for shopping cart.   Even for gaming my 4 core plays everything very well for an 8 year old budget part.

 

 

 

[atxcyclist]

19 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

Phenom II x6 SKUs were affordable and competitive at the time, but yeah, I guess that’s the only real example. Intel’s enthusiast chips were definitely outrageous early on, even more so with the silly board costs.

I have a server going at my office with a spare Phenom II X6 in a Dell XPS motherboard that I had sitting around. Power consumption is high, but it still works fine. 

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

I have a server going at my office with a spare Phenom II X6 in a Dell XPS motherboard that I had sitting around. Power consumption is high, but it still works fine. 

The reality is that over the last decade the need for more computing power is exaggerated by marketing more than actual requirements.   Sure there are examples of needing 8+ performance cores, but the reality is they are edge cases not mainstream consumers who would easily get away with 4 mid tier cores without pain.

 

Intel could have put in 8 cores in their CPU's in 2010 if they wanted,  by why would they add that much value and raise the end cost of a product that the vast majority of their customers don't need and thus risks not generating the an adequate ROI.

[atxcyclist]

Just now, mr moose said:

The reality is that over the last decade the need for more computing power is exaggerated by marketing more than actual requirements.   Sure there are examples of needing 8+ performance cores, but the reality is they are edge cases not mainstream consumers who would easily get away with 4 mid tier cores without pain.

 

Intel could have put in 8 cores in their CPU's in 2010 if they wanted,  by why would they add that much value and raise the end cost of a product that the vast majority of their customers don't need and thus risks not generating the an adequate ROI.

Very true. For people that are doing very computational-heavy work all this extra power is nice, but even most gamers and office workers cannot harness more than a mid-range chip these days. The most impressive thing about modern hardware is what you get out of an i3 or a Ryzen 3, more than enough for the vast majority of users, and sometimes they're even under $100 USD MSRP. 

 

I'm still using a 4790k at stock frequency on my workstation at the office. Admittedly it was at the very top of "consumer" hardware when new, but even when I'm doing 3d architectural renders for clients or energy calculations, it gets the job done nicely. There are still a lot of systems running pre-Skylake Intel and even some FX AMD processors that will be useful for quite some time.

[PeachGr]

Bigger than that, was the day that SSD came to consumers. For 25$ you could bring back to life old PC and make new ones significantly faster than old generation. 

And before that, the USB flash drive. CDs died silently after a couple if years, and the whole data transfer changed

[minibois]

On 7/28/2020 at 5:49 AM, Deslumo said:

When was the last time something as big as zen 2 happened?

Zen 1 IMO.

I personally even postponed buying my new PC at the time, to not go with Intel 7th gen and instead go for Ryzen.

 

Otherwise, most launches (including video card launches) have felt quite incremental in my opinion. Especially video cards.

[Elvara]

If you take computer as a whole and you are older than Linus, my first computer had a 486DX25 CPU so I remember some of them

the SDRAM DDR was a big deal.
the CD-rom (no more 10 floppy disks to install something, windows 3.1 was 6 or 8 disk iirc).

the AGP slot for graphics card replacing PCI (Riva TNT, my geforce 3 Ti 500 was the most expensive card I bought for a long time)

the switch from PATA to SATA (that old cable was such a pain to manage).

the USB (that's probably the best one for me everything can be plugged to USB now).

the Bios switching to UEFI (big deal for advanced user I guess).

the end of dial up internet for Broadband xDSL, cable (DOCSIS) and FFTx now.

the SSD.

 

There's actually so many the first multi-core processor, the end of CRT and probably a lot more. For the CPU progress in recent years you don't always see a huge improvement from one generation of CPU to the next, sure my first gen I7-860 at 2.8Ghz is clearly outdated by now but if I compare it to a 2nd or 3rd gen core i7, I don't think I had 50% gain at stock in benchmark.

 

Anyway at some point amd vs intel or nvidia vs ati(well amd actually) one of them was way better or added something new then it was almost similar for a few years.

[LAwLz]

Zen 2 wasn't even that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. So last time something that big happened was probably like a year, max, before Zen 2 was launched.

Comparing the launch of Zen 2 (which was like a 15% IPC increase) to such a revolutionary thing as the launch of SSDs (which increased performance by hundreds of percent) is not exactly a good comparison in my mind.

Even Zen 1 was a way bigger change than Zen 2 was.

[Pixel5]

On 7/28/2020 at 5:55 AM, Samfisher said:

Honestly, when the Intel Core series came out.  It was such a game changer and left AMD lurching around for what feels and probably was 10 years catching up.

that is not true, the core series lost HARD in terms of performance to AMD 64, the reason why intel became big is because they paid off big OEM´s like Dell, IBM or HP to never use AMD CPU´s.

heres a short overview, there are tons of articles about this topic out there, this story goes back 30 years and was on going for about 20 years, its the entire reason intel ever had such a huge advantage over AMD.

 

[Samfisher]

3 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

that is not true, the core series lost HARD in terms of performance to AMD 64, the reason why intel became big is because they paid off big OEM´s like Dell, IBM or HP to never use AMD CPU´s.

heres a short overview, there are tons of articles about this topic out there, this story goes back 30 years and was on going for about 20 years, its the entire reason intel ever had such a huge advantage over AMD.

 

AMD64 was released in 2003, Core 2 Duos were released in 2006.  First dual core Athlon64s were released in 2005.  And according to this review on Anandtech, AMD aren't that close.

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/2276/16

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Elvara said:

If you take computer as a whole and you are older than Linus, my first computer had a 486DX25 CPU so I remember some of them

the SDRAM DDR was a big deal.
the CD-rom (no more 10 floppy disks to install something, windows 3.1 was 6 or 8 disk iirc).

the AGP slot for graphics card replacing PCI (Riva TNT, my geforce 3 Ti 500 was the most expensive card I bought for a long time)

the switch from PATA to SATA (that old cable was such a pain to manage).

the USB (that's probably the best one for me everything can be plugged to USB now).

the Bios switching to UEFI (big deal for advanced user I guess).

the end of dial up internet for Broadband xDSL, cable (DOCSIS) and FFTx now.

the SSD.

 

There's actually so many the first multi-core processor, the end of CRT and probably a lot more. For the CPU progress in recent years you don't always see a huge improvement from one generation of CPU to the next, sure my first gen I7-860 at 2.8Ghz is clearly outdated by now but if I compare it to a 2nd or 3rd gen core i7, I don't think I had 50% gain at stock in benchmark.

 

Anyway at some point amd vs intel or nvidia vs ati(well amd actually) one of them was way better or added something new then it was almost similar for a few years.

I'm older than Linus.

 

These are the things I distinctly remember being "a big deal"

 

1. 386 (32-bit), but because this was 1987 it didn't actually end up in peoples computers because at this point in time PC/XT/AT's were not even that common. So let me use a point of reference. Both the middle school (grade 7 and 8 ) and the high school, had 386's even in 1998, that's a full 5 years, they were still deploying 386's in the library when the pentium 75's were put into service in 1996.

2. Hard drives. I kid you not, 1988 dad bought a Tandy 1000, and "memory" was synonymous with both RAM and Disk drive at that point in time. The computer didn't come with a hard drive but did come with an 8-bit expansion card that brought it to 640K.

3. RLL hard drive controller. You may just want to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_limited as all I can remember the "big deal" bit was that it turned existing ST506 MFM drives into 50% higher capacity drives and it predated what we now call PATA IDE. You can find some usenet sources from 1993 even making a big deal about this. Anyway the 286 had been configured this way.

4. Sound cards. 386-era. If you had a Tandy 1000 or a PCjr, you had a 3-voice pc-speaker that could play three square wave or noise channels at once. This was neat, but exactly as impressive as the sega master system as that was the same audio chip. The Adlib came out in 1987, but I only ever saw two of these ever. One was in a computer at Radio Shack which was demo'ing lemmings and holy crap was that impressive for the time. however it wasn't until the Sound Blaster in 1989 that things really changed. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

 

The first PC game I heard with adlib music was Lemmings, but the first game I heard with the sound blaster was Ecoquest with the dolphin yelling "I got it" full blast. The other game that kinda made me fly off the chair was Ultima 7's "AVATAR" during the opening. Both of these games had only been played before with the PC Speaker on a 386.

 

5. The 486DX66, the first "clock doubled" CPU. Also the DX models had an integrated FPU. So now you could do CAD at home. Likewise the DX4 model (clock tripled). So these were basically known as the 486DX33, 486DX2/66 and 486DX4/100 (really 99.) This is when DOS games started to malfunction and turning Turbo off only turned off the L1 cache. At this point in time Cyrix and AMD released 486-pin compatible "586" processors which lead to...

6. Intel giving their 5th generation CPU the brand "Pentium" in 1993, F00F and FDIV bugs were notorious, but the Pentium 90's FDIV ... in CAD machines was really a catastrophic mistake (something Intel should have learned from, but clearly has not.)

7. The BX chipset (Pentium II), this is literately the standard that all current PC's emulate in their virtual machines.

8. ATX layout boards. Prior to this you had AT and BabyAT boards, and the super io had to be on a separate card (That would be the serial ports, parallel port and PATA IDE drives), until ATX, you had to waste one or two slots on these cards, and they would be on PCIe, VLBus or even ISA cards.

9. DRAM, FPDRAM, EDO RAM, SDR, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, DDR4 RAM generations. SDRAM might be the first time that RAM wasn't a supreme pain in the ass to find. DDR applied the same clock doubling first seen with the 486DX2, and we were then off to the races of which memory tech was better. Rambus nearly screwing us...

10. Intel's Pentium 4. RAMBUS SUCKS. The i820 Memory translator hub was garbage. Intel blunder strikes again.

11. The Pentium II and Pentium III (and Athlon) all came out on slot CPU cards, which also came with required heatsinks and fans, where as all previous chips required after-market coolers, which typically had the fans gum up after a few years. But at the time replacing the fans was easy because they were a standard hobby-electronics style fan screwed directly onto the heatsink.

12. USB (1998.) Enough said. Basically pushed by Apple, and never seen on the vast majority of pre-ATX systems.

13. SATA (2003.) Enough said, with SATA a much faster interface and less obnoxious cabling scheme was standard. Both PATA and SCSI involved thick cables that were super-difficult to manage and often too long or too short.

14. Integrated GPU's. Beginning with Intel's i810 (1999), Intel moved to their new "hub" architecture, or a fancy name of calling the south bridge "the rest of the brain", so the i810 had an integrated video card and no exposed AGP bus.

15. VLBus, PCI and AGP. For a while there, it was looking like VLBus was going to win because it operated at twice the speed of PCI, and worked with the 486's memory bus, however VLBus could only ever have two (sometimes three, though I've never seen three slot boards,) so it was more akin to having an extension to the motherboard, and no other expansion card other than the super io and video card could go in it as consequence. The problem was that it was only designed to work with the 486. PCI on the other hand, operated at 33Mhz and all the slots could be PCI and still work. In practice only 4 PCI cards could work as only 4 PCI interrupts were ever available on most boards. This lead to a dedicated "PCI" slot called AGP, and that went from AGP to 2X to 4X and Intel never put AGP logic into a chipset until the Pentium II.

 

16. So at this point we now hit a turning point, Y2K, Windows 98/2K, and the first time we start seeing a genuine interest in throwing away old equipment. Y2K bugs made some old equipment entirely unusable, some just had to be rebooted, but because the realtime clocks were programmed to only recognize the last two digits. Lots of fun seeing websites go "Copyright 19100" (sometimes a string overflow error just broke the site) or "Copyright 1900"

 

Past this point, most "significant changes weren't really as amazing, ground breaking or innovative, it was just the end result of shrinking chips and increases in transistor counts.

 

17. APM, ACPI, UEFI Bios. Only UEFI was really groundbreaking but ACPI was the first time you could have your computer shutdown without pressing the power button. APM was only found in laptops. Windows 98 however had to be installed in ACPI mode to support this, and most of the time didn't. So this curse followed us to UEFI, where Windows installs have to be booted in UEFI mode to be installed in UEFI mode.

18. Zip drives and CD-ROM's. Zip drives were the first, rewritable high-capacity disks you could buy, They were also expensive, came in Parallel Port and SCSI models, and... had a terrible viral mechanical "click of death" problem. There's still one of these at my office. 2X CD-ROM's all came on proprietary interface cards attached to soundcard multimedia kits, even though the 40-pin interfaces looked like IDE, they were not.

19. Rewritable/Recordable CD-ROM's, now I know these came out in 1991, but what I want to state is that the ability to get a "burner" drive was something that only really became standard around 1999. Prior to that, you needed a SCSI card and an expensive drive that only burned 2x or 4x speed. But hey, it stored 6x as much as zip drive, and when you only had 33.6K internet, you saved everything you downloaded so you didn't have to download it again. 

20. 2400 baud, 14.4Kbps, 2b8.8kbps, 33.6kbps, 56Kbps. Remember BBS's, this was literately the first time I was ahead of anyone in my family on tech stuff, but the also the expensive lesson on long distance costs.

21. Cable modem. They were first rolled in in Canada by Rogers circa 1999, then there was the @home network. Then everything imploded when people discovered Napster. Cable and DSL didn't come to rural cities for another few years.

22. SSD's would be the next great leap. You can still buy SATA SSD's, but really it's the PCIe SSD's which have blown away all that came before it. But when flash media first became available it was expensive (I remember having 8MB cards, not GB) and proprietary in a lot of camera devices. Speaking of...

23. Digital Still Cameras. I had an Epson PhotoPC back in the day, and I literately had a digital camera before everyone where I lived at the time. I keep finding the box from time to time, but the camera is long gone. good ol 320x240 32 picture capacity or 640x480 16 picture capacity on 1MB that you then had to transfer via serial cable, slowly. That might actually be the first device I had that had flash memory. The memory expansion was more expensive than the camera and I never got it.

24. GPU's, more specifically 3DFx, as the first GPU that was actually legitimately a way to add this new fangled 3D tech to a computer. It just came too early and all the other GPU's ate it for breakfist by offering true 32-bit (ATI) color modes when 3DFX only offered 8-bit palletized textures.

25. MT-32/CM32-L/LAPC-I, this was what all computer games were designed to use before General Midi wavetable took over. 

 

 

If you had Japanese computers, the history regarding music and sound will be different as their computers often had built in FM synths or OPM tone generators. Japanese computers were closer to game consoles than western ones as recently as 1995. In the US, the Amiga was the closest thing in design to a Japanese computer. You can thank Windows 95 for making Japanese computers standardize.

 

Like just going back to "is Zen2 a giant leap", nah SSD's were probably the biggest leap in the last 10 years (quite literately going from a high end HDD to a good M2 SSD is a net 35x increase in disk performance,) with Cable/DSL modems being the giant leap for the 2000's, and Sound cards and CD-ROM's for the 90's.

 

Honorable mentions go to GPU parts for the 90's (specifically 3DFX), and the MT-32/CM32-L/LAPC-I sound modules. Once everyone got to Windows XP in 2001, a lot of the PC's quirky nature became less crappy, less reliable CPU's like the AMD 6x86 and Cyrix/Via parts were shunned in favor of much better designed chips, and this came the era of XP is full of security holes, and much innovation started going into networking hardware (which you'll note I almost entirely omitted up there)

 

WiFi, not a giant leap, it was such a chicken and egg game to start with, and while every laptop now has it, it never used to be that way. Laptops as late as Pentium 4 models still only had PCMCIA slots with no network cards and no modems. It wasn't until WiFi "kits" started being sold with matching PCI cards to a router in the box that people eventually started adopting it. ISP's eventually jumped on this bandwagon as well, as they saw it as a way to charge the customer twice for the same internet.

 

[mr moose]

55 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

that is not true, the core series lost HARD in terms of performance to AMD 64, the reason why intel became big is because they paid off big OEM´s like Dell, IBM or HP to never use AMD CPU´s.

heres a short overview, there are tons of articles about this topic out there, this story goes back 30 years and was on going for about 20 years, its the entire reason intel ever had such a huge advantage over AMD.

 

I've got a couple of long posts around here somewhere explaining why while what Intel did was shit and had some serious effects, it wasn't the reason AMD failed with bulldozer or why they struggled with GPU's.

 

Their R+D budget over the last 13 years is quite telling of how they managed to make ZEN on the lowest R+D budget of the last 13 years but failed to get Bulldozer going with what was significantly higher R+D.