[geeks] Yeow! That is a pricey CPU for a PeeCee!

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, Ken Hansen wrote:

> The Pentium III was never meant for desktop machines, per Intel while they 
> were working on them, same with the Pentium Pro and maybe even the
> Pentium II. Few believed Intel, it was probably more marketing hype than
> anything else. ("Oh no sir, you don't want that computer -it's *too*
> fast for you, but if you *insist*...") 
 
Perhaps it just was market hype.  I mean, SSE (which debuted in the P3)
just screams desktop machine, so regaurdless of what they said, it
obviously wasn't meant just for servers.

> I forget which chip it was, but there was one intel chip that was actually
> *slower* than the chip it replaced for normal, end-user applications
> (MS-Office, etc.).

I believe you are talking about the Pentium Pro.  For programs with 16bit
code (say, Windows 95) it was really a dog.  If you ran Office on NT, 
it was supposed to be faster.  Any pure 32bit program on NT was
supposed to be faster than the same program on a PentiumMMX.  This was
well documented by BYTE at the time.

While the PPro was meant for workstations, the pentium pro really was
clearly never for the common user.  Also note, that MMX came out, the the
PPro came out, without MMX. Clearly not something that would impress
desktop users, but also something of little consequence to server and
workstation people.

--
Joshua Boyd