your favorite processor. old or new.

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i just so happen to forking love the Pentium 3 when it comes to 32 bit computing (64 bit does sound cool but im stuck with a Pentium D). especially the Tualatin core which can go up to 1.40ghz and can even be over clocked on some boards.

imagine this you get a dual socket 370 motherboard, put in the best agp card you can get your hands on and then load up about 2 or 4 gb of memory and play portal on it! and yes its physically possible to play portal on a pentium 3-s with a geforce 6200 (i havent tested the geforce 5500 yet will let you guys known when i do). you can even run it on boards like the Intel D815eea2.

i love cats :3

anyway now that i got that stupidity off my chest (ticking off some people) what kind of processors do you like? what do you do with them? and if its old (like from 2003) do you still use it for your modern day stuff like run adobe cs5 or play left 4 dead on it? what are the full specs of it?

The Intel 80286.

It was the first computer I programmed on.


Old like 1982. Although the system I had was probably from around 1985.


A 16-bit processor. If you pressed the 'turbo' button, it ran at 12 Mhz instead of 6 Mhz.

It came with 2 floppy drives, a 5 1/4" and a 3 1/2", as well as a spacious 40 Mb hard drive. It had a full Mb of RAM as well.

BTW, megahertz and megabytes aren't typos. The first gigabyte hard drive didn't show up until around 1995.

Dang you're old. I'll stick with my Phenom II X4 955.

some of them have certainly been much better than others. had a Intel 486 25 mhz that cost like US$2500, ridiculous, waste of time and money. sigh. then the 100mhz version that came out from AMD I think, several times as fast at a fraction of the cost, best upgrade ever. It was when the whole clock mulitiplier thing caught on, and those ruled for a few years.

i can never pick favorites, but i was real happy with amd for a long time after that upgrade.

I remember that. The grad student I assisted in college had one, it was faster than the lab's $30K Sun.

They did have GB hard drives (just a bit) before 1995, just not on PC's. My alpha at work had two 2GB drives, but the drives alone cost a small fortune each.

The Zilog Z80.
A great little chip and dead easy to design hardware around. I programmed in assembler for a long while (or Pascal wrappers around it, when I was feeling lazy) and treated its opcode set like a high level language. It's also nice to be able to read the assembly code directly from a hex dump of the executable binary.
Ah, happy days...
I don't think you really understand how computers work until you lock horns with the CPU itself.

I've recently rediscovered the joys of bit-twiddling with the PIC micocontrollers from Microchip, and it's ridiculous the stuff they've managed to pack into a single chip.

I had better not say the 6502 then.

8 bits, 1 Mhz was the processor that bought computing to the masses courtesy of Apple, the commodore 64, atari, BBC micro, acorn electron...

The Z80-based TRS-80 was launched in 1977 and more or less ran in parallel with the Apple although there were 8080-based (an ancestor of the Z80) 'home computers' available before that, and Motorola 6800 machines before those. (eg. the SWTPC 6800 from 1975)
The original Apple II was launched in 1977, a couple of months before the Tandy. The Nascom I (Z80-based) was launched a couple of months after the Tandy.

The starting price for the Apple was $1298 (with 4kB RAM) and $2638 (with the maximum 48kB RAM); the Tandy cost $399 (with 4kB RAM), or $599 with a 12" monitor and a Radio Shack tape recorder for data storage.
The Nascom was £197.50 with 2kB RAM and probably cheaper than the Tandy back then - because you received a bag of components, a bare PCB, and built the thing yourself.

My my, how times have changed...

I was going to mention the whole 6502-family as being my favorite processors but I couldn't really answer the question of how I use them. The only 6502 family processor I have is a Ricoh 5A22 which is built the super nintendo I own (this is the only video game system I have held on to from my childhood and it is because of the 6502).

I am also a fan of the MIPs family of processors, as I learned assembly by writing Othello (with a mini-max AI) in assembly a few years back. I think it comes out at about 20 pages of well commented assembly code.

Obviously, I like RISC architectures (even though none of the computers I use are RISC).

6502s, 8502s and Z80s ...

Ah, those were the days!

6502

Heh - I took the question literally because to me, "processor" means the CPU itself so I answered along those lines. It appears the OP means the whole machine as based around a particular CPU.

Oh, and Gak66 - "its old (like from 2003)". Wut!? 2003 was only 8 years ago. That's not old; that's more like 'thoroughly tested'.

Arm 3

Bullet proof and many still in full use today. I also like the simple instruction set of arm. I've always thought a simple instruction set is a far better approach than x86s complex algorythms anyway.

Yes, x86 is not nearly as fun to write assembly with, there are just too many instructions. Plus so many of the instructions (MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, 3DNOW, etc) aren't available on all processors so you have to start targeting very specific hardware in order to use some of the newer SIMD instruction extensions. They just seem to continuously tack on new features to the architecture, always requiring backwards compatibility.

Totally agree!

Most people will never utilize some of the more complex instructions (like sse) anyway. Not to mention that by using lots of fast simple instructions most of the large instructions can be kind-of emulated anyway.

(posted using an arm6 600mhz cpu BTW)

My Favorites...

MOS 6510 1.02 Mhz (My first computer)
Cyrix 486 40 Mhz (First computer I built with a CD-ROM and graphics card)
Intel Pentium 60 Mhz (First Computer I had with Internet access)
Intel P4 2.4 Ghz (My current workhorse)