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This was triggered by the thread on the collapse of Adobe's PrintGear.
There have been a lot of CPUs that did not feel much love: the 80286, the AMD Bulldozers, the Celeron D, but the one that got absolutely creamed in public opinion was the IDT WinChip. Which is ironic, as it was a technological success.
In the late 1990's, the most common CPU socket was the so-called Socket 7. Unlike today, these motherboards would accept CPUs from several vendors: Intel, AMD, IBM/Cyrix, and others. You could take a machine with an Intel CPU, pop it out, put in one from AMD and go on your way. This, of course, put a lot of pressure on CPU makers to build better and better chips.
At the time, Intel was selling their Pentium MMX line in the $400-500 range. The competitors were selling similalry priced chips for similar performance (AMD) or slightly slower chips for a little less money.
IDT came along and asked "is this the optimal thing to do?" So they profiled a lot of desktop applications and discovered:
How did they beef up performance? They used eight times as much cache as the competition.
So, why was it hated?
(1) If you already owned a Socket 7 computer, there is no reason to spend $90 on a less performant CPU. If you didn't, you could save some money, sure, but it's not afactor of 4 or 5; it's more like 30%,
(2) Benchmarks of the day were more CPU-intensive than typical application code, so this chip underperformed.
(3) The idea of a "gaming PC" was just starting to evolve, and gaming workloads differ from the "business workloads" that the chip was optimized for.
The irony is that the idea was a success, even if the product was not. What are today's Intel E-Cores? A simpler CPU connected to a boatload of cache.
It's impossible to tell, but had this come out in 2004 instead, appropriately scaled, this could have been a fierce c ompetitor to the new dual-core Pentiums: a quad core thatb cost less and used less power. But the market zigged when they thought it would zag.
There have been a lot of CPUs that did not feel much love: the 80286, the AMD Bulldozers, the Celeron D, but the one that got absolutely creamed in public opinion was the IDT WinChip. Which is ironic, as it was a technological success.
In the late 1990's, the most common CPU socket was the so-called Socket 7. Unlike today, these motherboards would accept CPUs from several vendors: Intel, AMD, IBM/Cyrix, and others. You could take a machine with an Intel CPU, pop it out, put in one from AMD and go on your way. This, of course, put a lot of pressure on CPU makers to build better and better chips.
At the time, Intel was selling their Pentium MMX line in the $400-500 range. The competitors were selling similalry priced chips for similar performance (AMD) or slightly slower chips for a little less money.
IDT came along and asked "is this the optimal thing to do?" So they profiled a lot of desktop applications and discovered:
- The CPU spent most of its time doing loads and stores (I don't know why this is ever a surprise)
- Fancy features like out-of-order execution take a lot of silicon, but only help speed a little.
- Floating-point is rarely used. You want something there, as fixed point emulation was up to 1000x slower, but whether it was 700x faster or 1500x faster made little difference.
How did they beef up performance? They used eight times as much cache as the competition.
So, why was it hated?
(1) If you already owned a Socket 7 computer, there is no reason to spend $90 on a less performant CPU. If you didn't, you could save some money, sure, but it's not afactor of 4 or 5; it's more like 30%,
(2) Benchmarks of the day were more CPU-intensive than typical application code, so this chip underperformed.
(3) The idea of a "gaming PC" was just starting to evolve, and gaming workloads differ from the "business workloads" that the chip was optimized for.
The irony is that the idea was a success, even if the product was not. What are today's Intel E-Cores? A simpler CPU connected to a boatload of cache.
It's impossible to tell, but had this come out in 2004 instead, appropriately scaled, this could have been a fierce c ompetitor to the new dual-core Pentiums: a quad core thatb cost less and used less power. But the market zigged when they thought it would zag.