Why you should appreciate older processors?

Question

I always thought that my Pentium 4 (clocked at 1.70 GHz) was super-slow, until one day I did some math. I looked up the first Pentium made, the Pentium MMX. It's clock rate is 223 MHz. Now, I divided 1.7 by .223 and I found out that my so called "slow processor" is over 7 times faster than the first Pentium ever made. This also show how much technology improves within a few years. Stop when you think of it, an old Pentium 4 isn't slow at all for a single core CPU.

Answer 1

The Pentium came out in the mid 90s with 60MHz clock speed. My first one was a 150MHz one without MMX.



But clock speed is only one factor in how fast a chip is. I've got a brand new MacBook Air with a Core i7 processor clocked at 'only' 1.8 GHz... the same as my old iMac G5 from 2004. But improved architecture (like number of transistors and how small they are, see Moore's Law), two cores, hyperthreading (imitating a quad-core processor), turboboosting (real-time overclocking), plus better cache (memory at full chip speed), RAM, and other things make it much much faster.



One reason why clock speeds have stagnated is the increased cooling required, some requiring complex and failure-prone liquid cooling, and the increased power consumption which makes them unsuitable for notebooks.

Answer 2

Well, you're actually incorrect on a number of things here. First, the earliest Pentium was the Pentium 60 clocked at 60MHz. Secondly (and more importantly), you cannot directly compare GHz among different series of processors. There are new i7 processors clocked at 1.7GHz, but they're exponentially faster than your Pentium 4, despite having the same GHz. If you ignore the CPU architecture, GHz means almost nothing.

Answer 3

Is there a gas leak in your bedroom?