Speed. It’s the main thing we all want in computers, be it desktop machines, smartphones, even game consoles, it all boils down to speed. In the computer world, speed equals power, or so it would seem. While the reality is far more complex and nuanced, when it’s all said and done faster components are generally better, and this is most well demonstrated in the CPU of the machine – the faster it is, generally, the more capable the overall machine is.
This was certainly the case through the 80’s and early 90’s, probably more so than any other time in the person computer revolution, where processor speed was the most important aspect of a computer. While things are different today, back in the 80’s and into the early 90’s, computer clock speeds were increasing wildly – individual chip sets, like the 386, might have versions that were 2, 3, or 4 times the raw speed of their baseline model, meaning if you had the money for it you could see some drastic improvements in your machines processing power due to the sheer speed increases.
Of course, this had a negative side effect in the Megahertz Myth, where in the 90’s and 2000’s people believed that the faster processor was always the better one; something simply not true in some cases, like comparing slower clocked PowerPC processors to faster Intel CPU’s of the same age.
This would also cause processor engineers to reach thermal limits with the then-standard architectures by the early 2000’s – they simply couldn’t be run faster safely, and soon focus changed from raw speed to getting more out of each clock cycle with multiple logical cores and improvements to code execution. Only recently have we begun to see processor speeds really begin to climb like they were in the early 2000’s, but even then it seems to be a slightly more reserved increase as time moves forward.
In this episode of The Computer Chronicles, we take a look at the state of computer speed in 1989. This episode demonstrates perfectly the drastic differences in processor speeds of the era, and talks about the future of computer speed, even touching just briefly on the planned “586” CPU which, as we all know, would become the legendary Pentium processor