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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

There was a point in time where the absolute best dollars/performance ratio was the AMD 386DX/40, which ran circles around the Intel 386DX/25 and 386DX/33, but was priced the same or less.

And was considerably less expensive than a very top end ($2500-3500 in 1992-1994 dollars) desktop built with something like a Pentium 60 or 66 MHz.

Inflation calculator tells me that a $2500 desktop PC in 1993 would be the same as about $4700 today. For 4700 you could build a real beast of a machine.

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> There was a point in time where the absolute best dollars/performance ratio was the AMD 386DX/40, which ran circles around the Intel 386DX/25 and 386DX/33, but was priced the same or less.

I remember when the best price/performance was a 300 Mhz Celeron A that you could overclock to 450 Mhz on an inexpensive A-bit BH6 motherboard. Paired with a 3dfx Banshee, and I remember being able to build a respectable gaming rig for under $600.

These days, $700 will barely get you a GPU, even at MSRP.

If you are going to compare what you can purchase today vs then, you should be comparing what you got for $600 vs what you can get for about $1000 today.

In the around 1000 dollar point today, if you set the design constraint to 1080p gaming, you can do quite a lot with a $175 CPU in a $145 motherboard, add maybe another $150 of RAM, and a $100 NVME SSD. The problem is the video card availability and marketing pricing.

Fair enough, I suppose, but seeing as it's over 20 years ago, I'm having a hard time deciding where those parts would fit. I figured those were all mid-grade parts, and today, a mid-grade GPU would be an RTX 3070 which has an MSRP of $500-600 depending on the brand, and a midgrade CPU (like a current gen Ryzen 5) will be nearly $300, that doesn't give you much left for the motherboard, RAM, storage, etc...

I think they're suggesting you adjust dollars for inflation.

The AMD 5x86/133 was a similar kind of situation. Drop one of those into a decent 486 board w/ some L2 cache and you got better than 75Mhz Pentium performance at a ridiculously low price point as compared to a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.

And again with the Athlon XP1800+ then Opteron.

AMD has had moments where it really stuck it to intel but always fell back to 2nd, I hope this time it sticks.

x86 vendors duking it out while Apple keeps both honest isn't a bad market for a buyer.

AMD wasn't even in the picture at that time really. Meaning their marketshare of desktop pc's were so low that no one had them. Back in those days it was Intel vs Cyrix.

AMD sold a ton of 386 and 486 processors and held much more market share than Cyrix. They were also very successful with their K6 and K6-2 Pentium competitor processors.

AMD absolutely was in the picture - they sold a ton of high-speed/low-cost 286 CPUs. In the mid and late 80s there was such a thing as a 286 12 MHz which sold for the same price as a much slower Intel part.

I'm referring to the whole time frame before the Cyrix 5x86 and similar were even a thing... There were plenty of AMD 286 and 386 CPUs sold in the early 1990s.

AMD sold lots of K6 and Athlons.

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