In the course of a PC career, you put many a CPU in the “socket” provided for it. Whether socketed or as a slot: Anyone who has been using PCs for gaming and working for a long time will have encountered many processors with different packages and cooling systems.
What memories do you have?
Depending on how long your own PC usage career lasts, a good dozen processors can come together in the course of your career. Today we would like to reminisce with you: Which more or less legendary processors do you still remember? Have you been around the times of the hot-headed Pentium 4, AMD’s hammer Athlon 64 or the Tualatin aka Pentium 3? Another classic is the Core 2 Quad Q6600, which performed excellently with overclocking, especially in G0 stepping. The Athlon XP 2500+ with Barton core is also a legend: many a PCGH editor pushed the CPU to the level of an Athlon XP 3200+.
The Celeron 300A dates back to 1998 (like the 333, also based on the Mendocino core), which bore its initials to distinguish it from the cache-less Celeron 300. And it was precisely this that quickly became a seal of quality for the overclocker scene. The Celeron CPUs not only had a level 2 cache on the chip itself, which is small at 128 KiB but very fast with the full CPU clock Raise the side bus from 66 to 100 MHz to the speed level of the outrageously expensive PII with 450 MHz.
So, which processor did you seriously start with and what “legendary” hardware is remembered for? Write your first CPU and also your personal processor history (also with pictures) as a comment under this news. In the following picture gallery you will find some suggestions as to which CPUs were known in the 70s, 80s, 90s or 2000s and some of which have achieved legendary status. PCGH editor Raffael Vötter talks about his first processor.
Background: The first processor
The first processor is a random product. In 1969, the Japanese company Busicom wants to buy a set of chips for programmable computing machines from Intel. To begin with, twelve building blocks are to be used. However, Frederico Faggin, who has since followed his former boss to Intel, has managed to implement the plans with just four chips and an all-round component. In 1971, the four-bit “all-round processor” entered the catalog as the 4004. The first commercial 4-bit microprocessor available as a single component, clocked at 0.74 MHz, revolutionized
the way computers were made and offered. The 2,300-transistor microprocessor had 16 internal and 4-bit wide GPR (General Purpose Register), it was based on the Harvard architecture. With a clock rate of 740 kilohertz, the chip could still process up to 92,000 instructions per second. This corresponds to almost 0.1 MIPS (million instructions per second) – a current Core i7 achieves six-digit MIPS numbers.
Just two months after the 4004, Intel brings the improved 8008 processor. It’s the Santa Clara-based company’s first 8-bit microprocessor. The chip, which communicated with the peripherals via 18 pins and clocked at 0.5 to 0.8 MHz, was neither pin- nor command-compatible with the 4004 and is considered the forefather of the x86 architecture. However, due to the complicated bus logic to implement, it was only used in controllers and large terminals – although it was extremely successful there. Various clones were quickly found, including those from the then relatively unknown company “Advanced Micro Devices”.
