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Comment by blackhaz | Hacker News Reader

I'll probably be downvoted, and sorry for the off-topic, but I miss those days when you could approximate computing power by looking at the processor's model number. 386SX-33, 386DX-40, 486DX2-66, and so on... Right now it's all becoming gibberish to me.. 1075, 4800u, 3950, 6600U. I don't even remember what CPU do I have. All the romance is gone!

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I suspect that's been deliberate at least on Intel's part since their year over year changes haven't been compelling for the better part of a decade. So their model numbers indicate 'new' without really quantifying 'improved' since that hasn't been a very good story for a while now.

That's just fundamental. In the golden age of VLSI scaling, from 1985 to 2003[1] or so, we really were seeing that doubling of transistor density with every 1.5-2 year generation, and the shrinking transistors were getting faster more or less linearly with size, leading to a quadratic improvement over time. Those days are almost two decades in the past, and they aren't coming back, ever.

We happen to be seeing a bump right now due to AMD migrating across two process nodes at once (and Intel having fallen a little behind), but that's just an instantaneous thing. The days of the 486 are still gone.

[1] My own dates. I'm bounding this roughly by the point where EDA tools caught up with process improvements (allowing straightforward die shrinks and scaling of logic) and the end of "free" frequency scaling due to thermal and power limits. Someone else probably has a different definition. Fight me.

>I don't even remember what CPU do I have. All the romance is gone!

I don't particularly remember feeling romantic about processor naming schemes; I do remember certain processors for being workhorses. However, I would agree that today, one needs to acquire an informed view to discern processor design and performance, variously across different architectures and manufacturers, over a period of time.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14043/upgrading-from-an-intel...

If you feel lost within the Intel naming convention, at least they provide a very handy guide.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/processor...

If you owned a 286 or a slow 386, owning a 486 with math co-processor was definitely a romantic desire in 1990.

>> If you owned a 286 or a slow 386, owning a 486 with math co-processor was definitely a romantic desire in 1990.

And the introduction of the 488sx shattered the dream of everyone finally having floating point hardware by default.

On the upside, why worry about the features or clock speed when you can use a processor's model number to estimate its price? [0]

[0]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15318/amds-64core-threadrippe...

I think that's called shifting priorities, and I can relate.

Numbers like 8088 vs 80286 vs 80386DX vs 80386SX (which was basically a 286 iirc) were confusing to people back then too. :) Then you had the 486SX and DX and Cyrix introducing things like the 486DLC...

Haha, that's because you're older now. I remember that feeling too, and I think the newer generation that sits on /r/buildapc or /r/pcgaming are definitely still feeling that love.

It's gotten very complicated especially since a lot of the value add of the newer processors is that they're more power-efficient and not necessarily much more powerful than the previous version.

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