[rasz]

Things started progressing so fast in mid nineties that brand new top of the line computer was being matched in performance by low end offerings 2 years later. Lasted up to late 2000.

December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching 1998 $621-824 Pentium 2s.

January 2002 $120 Duron 1300/Celeron 1300 beating 2000 $1000 Athlon 1000/Pentium 3 1000-1133

June 2007 $40 Celeron 420 overclockable out of the box from stock 1.6 to 3.2GHz beat best $1000 CPUs of year 2005 (FX-57, P4 EE).

Same goes for Graphic chips starting around 1998/9.

[dspillett]

> December 1998 $85 Celeron 300A handily beating June 97 $594 Pentium 233 MMX, not to mention overclocked one matching 1998 $621-824 Pentium 2s.

Ah, I remember the days of Intel's fabs doing “too good” a job and many more chips passing tests for faster use being produced than expected. To fulfil orders for the slower chips some of these better batches were marked down and sold as slower units, so if you were lucky you could really push the overclocking and get yourself a performance bargain. You also needed a good motherboard and quality RAM to pull it off reliably, of course.

Sillyrons is what we used to call the massively overclocked Celerons. At Uni a friend of mine made a good bit of pocket money from selling an optimisation service, for people who didn't feel confident playing with such settings themselves.

[Tuna-Fish]

It wasn't just that. Mendocino wasn't a low bin, it was an entirely separate die from Pentium II. At the time, Pentium II used a 512kB off-die L2 cache, running at half cpu clock. To save on costs, Celeron 300A moved to a 128kB L2, which was integrated on the CPU die, and which ran at full cpu clock.

And it turns out that for a lot of software, a smaller but faster L2 was actually better than the bigger one. And because there were no fast products that used the Mendocino die, even the fastest of them were sold as Celerons. 300A was particularly nice because very nearly all of them could run at 450, and 100MHz FSB motherboards were widely available to pair with the fixed 4.5 multiplier of the CPU.

[jl6]

It's so much fun living through the steep bit of an S curve that we imagine it might last forever...

[Ekaros]

On other hand not being hopelessly outdated in a relatively short time does have perks. It is cheaper to not have to update constantly and still getting decent performance.

[canpan]

I get the feeling. The 90s in particular, maybe even until crysis went super fast. Then tech felt incredibly stagnant for over a decade.

But the time since 2020 feels much faster again. It's scary! But it's exciting.

[mememememememo]

Apple M chips?

[irishcoffee]

I assumed the comment was about LLMs...

[consp]

Fun thing is with a tiny bit of manipulation you can run a P3 tualatin at 1.33ghz via a slot adapter and some pin disablement and some voltage mods (or if you had the right adapter a jumper) in a motherboard which came with a low tier P2 or even earlier. So without replacing your Asus P2B from very early 1998 well up to mid 00s with astonishing performance gains, that motherboard had a massive lifespan in the right hands. Mine is still running with a new voltage regulator to this day.

[tracker1]

Better, throwing in two of those Celeron 300As into a modded dual socket MB... I remember running one of those OC'd Duron's at 1.1ghz... had a custom shim to better support the cpu cooler with it. IIRC, I ran it with a Voodoo 3 card and maxed out ram. Had 2x IBM Deathstar drives in Raid-0... that was the big mistake, crazy fast, but first drive died, and then the second before I could get an RMA on the first. Only the 3tb Seagate line was worse.