I remember seeing one of the first Pentium's, it was either a 60 or 66mhz, but it was STUPIDLY fast. Way faster than any 486 we had at the time. We were just watching someone play Windows 3.11 solitaire on it and laughing when they won because the card "waterfall" animation took what felt like 1 second to complete. It was probably longer, maybe 3-4 seconds, but on our 486's it was probably 10-15 seconds.

Nope, the original Pentiums at 60/66 MHz were sometimes slower than 486 DX/4 at 100 MHz, but I don't remember the specifics. Pentium at 90 MHz was already faster at all times, the 100 MHz one had no competition from that DX/4.

> As far as i remember Pentium at 100 MHz was slower than a 486 DX/4 at 100 MHz

No... the Pentium had advantages in both IPC (two pipes vs one) and bus speed (66MHz/64 bit vs at most 50MHz/32 bit).

I'd be interested to see a more info on this this, but I suspect you'd be hard pressed to write anything at all on the DX4 that ran faster than on the Pentium.

(The jump from Pentium to Pentium Pro would've been different, due to the way the Pentium Pro deliberately sacrificed 16-bit performance for gains on the 32-bit workloads Intel thought would dominate by then.)