this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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I remember when the processors were cool, and had cool names, like Pentium.
Pentium was only cool because it followed i8086 - i80186 - i80286 - i80386 - i80486.
So instead of just increasing the number by 100 and calling it i80586 like they'd done for more than a decade, Pentium was the first to even have a name. AFAIK this was only for copyright reasons, because you can't copyright a number. Pentium as a descriptive name however was a dead end, because following that logic the next gen would be Hexium which sounds stupid. So it was not a good naming scheme.
Apart from that the first Pentium 60 and 66 MHz definitely weren't cool, they sucked balls, because they got hot and performed terribly, and were very expensive for the time. 486 were generally better up until Pentium 2 came out.
No way. Late stage Pentiums were markedly better than 486.
My parents bought a Pentium 1 133 mhz with Windows 95 in late 1996 and it worked great (for the time)
At my parents work they had an 486 with Windows 95 and it was noticeably less responsive. It was not a fun experience. I don't remember the exact model number of the 486 (I wasn't even 10 years old back then), but I do remember Pentiums being generally much more performant than computers with 486. From memory, 486 computers generally ran Windows 3.11 and were not upgraded to Windows 95 (keep in mind that everything was pirated, licensed Windows copies among business users was more of mid-2000s thing where I lived).
That is not what I remember, Pentium was horrible, and even Pentium Pro was horrible too, except not quite as much.
Of course if you compare with an old i486 25SX that's worse and lacked a floating point unit. But when Pentium MMX came out the AMD 486 DX4 at 120 MHz had been out for a while. You have to compare with the i486 that was available at the same time. I don't quite remember the details, but here was also AMD K6 and K6-2 that competed well against Intel.
Pentium 2 was decent and a lot better than the original Pentium, and Pentium Pro and Pentium MMX were not very good either. Pentium 3 was very good. Then Pentium 4 was horrible again. And it became AMD with Athlon.
But GPU, RAM and Motherboards were also significant factors in responsiveness back then. Those are generally not an issue for ordinary desktop usage today.
But in the mid 90's Windows 95 was pretty taxing for just a slightly old computer. Running Windows with a slow GPU/Driver driver would absolutely kill the performance no matter which CPU was onboard.