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jmyeet 7 hours ago

That wasn't how it worked.

Up until the 486, the clock speed and bus speed were basically the same and topped out at about 33MHz (IIRC). The 486 started the thing of making the CPU speed a multiple of the bus speed eg 486dx2/66 (33MHz CPU, 66MHz bus), 486dx4/100 (25MHz CPU, 100MHz bus). And that's continued to this day (kind of).

But the point is the CPU became a lot faster than the IO speed, including memory. So these "overdrive" CPUs were faster but not 2-4x faster.

Also, in terms of impact, yeah there was a massive incrase in performance through the 1990s but let's not forget the first consumer GPUs, namely 3dfx Voodoo and later NVidia and ATI. Oh, Matrox Millenium anyone?

It's actually kind of wild that NVidia is now a trillion dollar company. It listed in 1998 for $12/share and adjusted for splits, Google is telling me it's ~3700x now.

giantrobot 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You got your multipliers backwards with the 486dx. The multipliers was on the CPU core rather than the bus. A dx2 was twice the memory bus speed. The dx4 was (confusingly) three times the bus speed. So a 486dx4/100 was a 33MHz bus with a 100MHz core.