alt Hacker NewsThe Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. Going from 75 MHz to 200 MHz meant that everything (CPU limited) ran 2x as fast (or better with architectural improvements).
Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
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> The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time.
About a week ago, completely out of the blue, YouTube recommended this old gem to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM
A Pentium 4, overclocked to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling.
Watching this was such an amazing throwback. I remember clearly the last time I saw it, which was when an excited friend showed it to me on a PC at our schools library. A year or so before YouTube even existed.
By 2005, my Pentium 4 Prescott at home had some 3.6GHz without overclocking, 4GHz models for the consumer market were already announced (but plagued by delays), but surely 10GHz was "just a few more years away".
> Nothing since has packed nearly the impact with the exception of going from spinning disks to SSDs.
"Bananas" core-counts gave me the same experience. Some year ago I moved to Ryzen Threadripper and experienced similar "Wow, compiling this project is now 4x faster" or "processing this TBs of data is now 8x faster", but of course it's very specific to specific workloads where concurrency and parallism is thought of from the ground up, not a general 2x speed up in everything.
I still remember my first CPU with a heatsink. It seemed like a temporary dumb hack.
SSDs were such a revolution though, and a really rewarding upgrade. I'd fit SSDs to friend and family computers as an upgrade.
GPUs for 3d graphics were a game changer.
I can see why you wouldn’t consider it as impactful if you weren’t into gaming at the time.
That wasn't how it worked.
Up until the 486, the clock speed and bus speed were basically the same and topped out at about 33MHz (IIRC). The 486 started the thing of making the CPU speed a multiple of the bus speed eg 486dx2/66 (33MHz CPU, 66MHz bus), 486dx4/100 (25MHz CPU, 100MHz bus). And that's continued to this day (kind of).
But the point is the CPU became a lot faster than the IO speed, including memory. So these "overdrive" CPUs were faster but not 2-4x faster.
Also, in terms of impact, yeah there was a massive incrase in performance through the 1990s but let's not forget the first consumer GPUs, namely 3dfx Voodoo and later NVidia and ATI. Oh, Matrox Millenium anyone?
It's actually kind of wild that NVidia is now a trillion dollar company. It listed in 1998 for $12/share and adjusted for splits, Google is telling me it's ~3700x now.
I don't know. I felt this way when switching from Intel laptop to Apple M1. I am still using it today and I prefer it over desktop PC.
In my experience, SSDs had a bigger impact. Thanks to Wirth's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) the steady across-the-board increase in processing power didn't equate to programs running much faster, e.g. Discord running on a modern computer isn't any more responsive, if not less responsive than an ICQ client was running on a computer 25 years ago.
SSDs provided a huge bump in performance to each individual computer, but trickled their way into market saturation over a generation or two of computers, so you'd be effectively running the same software but in a much more responsive environment.