What came after the 486?

I remember fondly the AMD K6/2 architecture. It was the CPU of a ultra-budget priced Compaq Presario laptop that got me through graduate school back in the day.

Some years later, back in my home country (Paraguay) I met a lady who had a side business being a VAR builder of desktop PCs. In my country, due to a lot of constraints, there was (and is) quite a money crunch and people tried to cheap out the most when purchasing computers. This gave rise to a lot of unscrupulous VAR resellers who built ultra-low quality, underpowered PCs with almost unusable specs at an attractive price while making a pretty profit. You could still get much better deals in both price and specs, but you had to have an idea about where to look.

Well, back to this lady. She said that during the early 2000s she was on the same line of business, selling beige box desktop PCs at the lowest possible prices. But she said that she loved the AMD K6 and K6/2 architectures because they provided considerable bang for the buck. The cost was affordable, and yet performance was good. Add some reasonable amounts of RAM and storage and you could have a well-performing PC at a good price. The downside, as she said, was that the processors tended to generate lots of heat and thus the fans had to be good. This was especially important in a very hot country like Paraguay. But the bottom line was that AMD K6 line enabled her to offer customers a good deal.

This made me appreciate what AMD did with K6. They really helped to bring good computers to the masses.

My first PC was a 286/12 with an AMD chip in it.

I well remember the 486SX/2-66's and how terrible they were. I liked to say that Compaq put the "sorry" in Presario.

In the late 90's, between around 96 and 98, I made good money building AMD 486 DX/4 133's. Those things were blindingly fast for the price. As I recall there was even a 150MHz variant.

Still, my favorite CPU of all time remains the AMD K6/2-450. It wasn't until the Phenom II BE950, a dual core that I unlocked to quad core , that I felt I had a CPU that matched the K6/2-450 in value. Since then I've had a couple of Ryzen's for my daily driver/work machine, and couldn't be happier. AMD has done a fantastic job keeping price and performance in tune. But, it goes even further if you shop smartly.

Overall, this was an excellent read, and brought back a lot of memories. The 6x86 for example- too much promise for what they actually delivered. And, thanks to this article I now know why so many cheap motherboards had their CPU's soldered. It wasn't a technology decision, but a legal one. I had no idea of that at the time.

I remember a 120MHz Pentium Linux box arriving at a cottage in Crete, where, with the aid of a 56k USRobotics modem, we (my wife and I) worked remotely in 1995-6. She had a Mac SE/30 for her tourist guidebook work. She later upgraded to a 6100 PowerMac "pizza-box", various iMacs, G3/G4/G5, whereas I saved a quad-200MHz PentiumPro monster (Compaq Professional Workstation 8000, tricked up to 3GB RAM) from the skip. I regret taking that to the recycling centre many years later.

I remember writing a cyberpunk story as a kid, in which everyone was rocking badass 786s.

Ah the pentium, aka 5-ium due to the penta- prefix. It is actually a nod from 4 to 5, but Intel wanted some cool name, and they decided penta + premium would sound cool, hence pentium.

But still, internally we call it i586, because that's the way it is. so is Pentium MMX which I reckon is called i686.

Nice nostalgic piece. I have a lot of fond "favorite chip" memories from that era.

Not to be too pedantic, I would contend that at the time, it was pretty clear to enthusiast what the differences were. Everyone in the industry was paying attention to 486s and the cost of a genuine intel chip. The FDIV bug was on every Evening News for weeks. AMD and Cyrix vs intel debates were common.

I agree that it is not obvious now that Pentium came after 486, but at the time, it was clear.

Something something Intel tried to add 100 to 486, got 585.97858475858473737272747837 and just called it pentium

I remember those Cyrix chips well. We had a little shop where we would assemble boxes to spec. And hey, a 486 is a 486, we reasoned. They were cheap, ran cool, and just about as fast as the others.

Another interesting episode "after the 486" was the switch from 32 bit to 64 bit, where Intel wanted to bury the ghost of the 8086 once and for all and switched to a completely new architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA-64), while AMD opted to extend the x86 architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64). This was probably the first time that customers voted with their feet against Intel in a major way. The Itanium CPUs with the new architecture were quickly rechristened "Itanic" and Intel grudgingly had to switch to AMDs instruction set - that's the reason why the current instruction set still used by all "x86" CPUs is often referred to as AMD-64.

Yea I'll take "Things that make me feel old for $1000 Alex."

I'll always have a fond spot in my heart for my cheap Cyrix CPU. Once I was near finishing an important project in the middle of the night and my CPU fan died. The cyrix chip would overheat in no time and shut down so I ended up filling a coffee mug with ice and jamming it up against the chip, giving me more precious minutes before it got hot enough to shut down again. I would swap out the ice in the mug and give it another go. I got that project done. :)

That's quite a lot of words to say "Pentium"

Sure AMD and a few others had back-seat answers, but Intel was literally driving the bus.

The years when Pentium came was a bit of an shitshow. As the article said, there were 7 companies producing 486 processors but after that the market was mostly Intel, AMD and little Cyrix. Then came socket-A vs. slot-A etc. Now looking back it seems like there was lot of changes in short period of time.

The worst part about the 486 name was all the varieties, an uninformed consumer could get a real lemon.

The author links to an example:

https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-486slc2-cpu-when-a-clone-isnt-a...

You then had the 486 DLCs which were even worse. you'd get companies that sold 386 and even 286 systems with '486' chips, constrained by slow, 16-bit buses, etc.

Second only to getting an SSD in my 2006-vintage laptop the AMD 5x86 was the best upgrade I ever put in a computer, dollars for performance. It made my 486SX-25 run like a 75Mhz+ Pentium. Linux kernel builds flew after that. I also fondly remember seeing little bits of "Second Reality" run better or show me things I'd never seen before (more of the sword extending further from the pool, as an example).

I loved the 486DX/4 at 120MHz. That thing was fast.

Ah. There's a whole generation of people who never enjoyed the Intel inside / Pentium jingle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVafplZCsjU

I had one of those 133 MHz 486 chips, think it was AMD. Nice DOS gaming machine.

I was a poor kid building computers in the mid to late 90's. I tried everything I could NOT to use a true Pentium. My first build (coming from an upgraded Compaq 386DX) was an AMD 486 "DX4". I had a Diamond Stealth PCI VGA card and 16mb of DRAM. After that I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. I had to run some software pentium emulation to get Cubase to run. I went 300Mhz Celeron after that. That was my first time trying the new SDRAM! After that I FINALLY got a legit Pentium III 400Mhz! I could go on and on as this is a lovely walk down memory lane and there's been some fun dips back into AMD Athlon/Ryzen/etc.

I never felt during this era that the information about these chips was hard to come by as the author claims. Retrospectively I appreciate that’s because I grew up living by a large, well funded library in a tech centric town, so they always had all the latest tech publications.

Fun fact: Bonnel Atoms (D510 etc) were not affected by the meltdown vulnerability that plagued every Pentium processor since the 1995 Pentiums. These Atoms use purely in-order execution engines which kinda makes them supercharged 486s.

I really like that VIA produced a CPU with integrated graphics, prominently labeled "VIA GRA", the same year that the FDA approved sildenafil.

> The original Pentium-branded CPU topped out at 200 MHz in the end, and the Pentium MMX-branded CPU reached 233 MHz.

There was a mobile 266MHz Pentium MMX, Tillamook

And it appears there was a 300MHz version according to Wikipedia.

The AMD 5x86 was the first Machine i ran Linux on

Cool writeup. I never knew they moved to the name Pentium over 586 simply for trademark ability.

I still keep and metal case of my first 486 with 66Mhz CPU with Windows 3.11 installed and remember that Pentium 100Mhz was what people were buying next.

I am almost 40 and only now realizing “pent”ium came after “4”86.

Booting up a Pentium after having used a 486 for years was like driving on the high way compared to riding a toddler bike on a foot trail.

This makes me feel old. I remember getting a 486 (DX4/100) in mid-1994, the Pentium was still too expensive!

Oof I'm old enough to remember the Cyrix chips. They were cheaper than the other players, which lured in a lot of people who then regretted it once they realised that they were constantly crashing hot-garbage. Good times.

They add 100 to the 486, but they got 585.99999999.... so they called it Pentium xD

Here's the answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos

Well pentiums of course! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_About_the_Pentiums