[krylon]

I haven't been able to keep those straight for years. Maybe this is just me getting old, but I miss the old days, when you could easily tell that a Pentium is faster than an 80486, and that a Pentium 133 is faster than a Pentium 100.

These days, CPU speed matters less than it did back then, but there still are CPU-hungry applications (I'm looking at you, Autodesk Inventor!), and if I had to put together a PC from scratch (which I think I'll actually sometime this year), I would be kind of lost.

[foota]

Part of the issue here, I think, is that cpu's are much more complex than they were then. You have a number of different cpu lines with different models on the market at any time.

[krylon]

That is true.

But that does make the decision what CPU is best for a given use case and budget much more complex, too.

(Like I said, the impact of the CPU on overall system performance is less today than twenty years ago for many use cases, so it is not that much of a problem.)