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Pentium

4 GoKawiil briefs on this topic

AMD's Athlon XP 'Performance Rating' launch turns 25

Twenty-five years ago, AMD released its Athlon XP processor line built on the Palomino core, which ran at lower clock speeds than Intel's Pentium 4 chips despite often matching or beating them in performance. To counter the industry's reliance on megahertz as a marketing yardstick, AMD introduced a Performance Rating naming scheme and the slogan 'Performance matters more than MHz.' Tom's Hardware testing at the time, led by Thomas Pabst, found Athlon XP chips beating higher-clocked Pentium 4 rivals in most benchmarks.

Apple M6 Mac Mini runs 86Box emulation of Pentium II/Voodoo 3 at stable 600MHz

A reviewer used a modified build of 86Box 6.0 to emulate a Pentium II PC with a Voodoo 3 graphics card on Apple's M6 Mac Mini, achieving a stable emulated clock of 600MHz. A 650MHz attempt produced occasional audio underruns, so 600MHz was recorded as the reliable result, tested alongside the M4 Mac Mini using identical disk images and emulated hardware configurations.

Repair enthusiast revives dead Intel Celeron 1200 by soldering in a donor pin

YouTuber Bits und Bolts repaired a 25-year-old Intel Celeron 1200 (Tualatin) chip that had a missing data pin and destroyed pad, which prevented any system from booting with it installed. By exposing underlying copper layers, applying solder mask, and grafting a donor pin from a separate broken Tualatin chip, the creator restored full function to the CPU. After the repair, the chip was successfully overclocked by 33%.

Windows 95 launched August 24, 1995, sparking unprecedented consumer lines

Microsoft released Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, an event that drew crowds lining up for the software in a way never repeated for a Microsoft product. The operating system marked a major upgrade over Windows 3.x, introducing true multitasking instead of relying on applications to cooperatively share resources. It also better exploited faster processors, unlike Windows 3.1, which plateaued in performance around 100 MHz regardless of chip.