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Comment by jvolkman | Hacker News Reader

I remember being jealous of my friend's Pentium (66? 90?) when mp3 playback slaughtered my 486.

I had an AMD DX4-120 that was overclocked to 160 Mhz. Yup, a 160 Mhz 486.

Was on par with a 90 Mhz Pentium for integer processing, IIRC, so MP3 playback didn't drag the system to a halt, though it was still a noticeable impact on performance.

What really dragged the performance down was when I'd try to run 3D Studio MAX at the same time. I had 24 MB of RAM, and the installer warned that they did not recommend running with less than 48 MB, which was an absurd number for a home user at the time.

The original Fraunhofer MP3 player, Winplay3, had settings to reduce decoding quality - which helped a lot on my 486.

https://youtu.be/vzQT4qkC-gk?t=110

When “Pentium” was the name of the very most precious metal one could obtain

That has to be one of the best advertising campaigns in history. I've heard non-technical people in the last few years still say things like "I think our new computer has a Pentium or something". The word Pentium was synonymous with quality and speed.

They might be right, though I wouldn't say the name is synonymous with speed anymore. Intel is still using this name for entry level cpus [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium

They should have left Celeron as the low-end SKU. Then they could use Pentium again nowadays. Core was a sensible branding to emphasize the fact that they were multicore when it was a new feature, but now that's old hat.

Now is actually a decent time for a naming scheme change, right? Apparently Golden Cove is supposed to be a bit of a jump.

It truly was all about the Pentiums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos

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