I feel sorry for these Pentium Pro CPUs. (and ebay idiots) (a rant)

[Keatah]

I feel sorry for these Pentium Pro CPUs.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=Pentium+pro&_pgn=2&_skc=200&rt=nc

 

They're being put on display, in a meat market, to be consumed in the fiery hell of a gold recycler to make jewelry for some illegitimate bitch kid of a rich movie "star".

 

Instead they should be coveted for the vast powerhouses they were back in the day. You know, if the internet were to be disrupted and damaged. These chips might be the only computational devices left. And they could theoretically bring tens of thousands of dollars each in a post apocalyptic dystopian society.

 

Today's kids are so high up on the tech food chain that if it were to break, they'd all hit the ground so hard they wouldn't be able to function. I mean like in the 1940's they invented the transistor and from that basic part you could build anything. But today, kids don't know what a transistor is. How are they expected to build anything from the ground up when all they know how to do is push shiny app icons and look like geniuses?!?!? WTF man.. this is crazy!!

 

 

 

In the meantime I asked the seller of this chip exactly what kind of paydirt nuggets were included.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-PENTIUM-PRO-CPU-FOR-GOLD-RECOVERY-PAYDIRT-NUGGETS-/251431353717?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a8a79fd75

 

And I'm wondering if this auction comes with the Gold Collector's Edition of the 4004?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/BRAND-NEW-Intel-Pentium-Pro-200MHZ-CPU-Vintage-PC-Computer-Collectable-4004-Gold-/121389812811?pt=CPUs&hash=item1c43658c4b

 

So I asked the sellers and we'll see what they say!

 

[BDW]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I07xDdFMdgw

 

Replace the lamp with those Pentium CPUs and it basically sums up how I feel.

[John_L]

Keatah should start PETIC People for the Ethical Treatment of Integrated Circuits.

[Osgeld]

I had a pentium pro, the system was large, hot, loud, picky about what OS it would take, and got its ass handed to it by a pentium2. Later in life I got a hold of a pair of p-pro's and gave them to a chip collector.

 

some reason the pro's have this unique ora around them, server class hardware back then was a thing to behold as the state of the art bad ass thing, instead of a pentium (non mmx) with a pile of cache slapped on, making them mostly worthless outside of processing a large que of user requests.

 

I feel sorry for the idiots that think the best time of their life was over a decade ago and are scared to move along and find joy in our dreams come true from back when

Edited July 23, 2014 by Osgeld

[SoulBlazer]

 

 

I feel sorry for the idiots that think the best time of their life was over a decade ago and are scared to move along and find joy in our dreams come true from back when

 

I feel the same way about retro gamers who refuse to try a modern game.

[Seob]

I had a P-Pro years ago, a 200Mhz single chip version. Bought it second hand for 90 euro. I installed Beos on it. I also used it for linux and it was running good. But indeed for the home user, the P-Pro was just overpriced if used as a single cpu setup. I think the advantage of the P-Pro was it's multi cpu capability. You couldn't do that with regular Pentium 1's.

[AtariLeaf]

 

 

Instead they should be coveted for the vast powerhouses they were back in the day. You know, if the internet were to be disrupted and damaged. These chips might be the only computational devices left. And they could theoretically bring tens of thousands of dollars each in a post apocalyptic dystopian society.

 

 

 

Sounds like they're all currently a bargain. Buy them all up and become King in the soon-to-be Mad Max world where pentium pro cpu's and cans of tuna fish are the currencies of the future

[carlsson]

I watched this show Money Melt the other day. One of the competitors extracted all the gold from some old telecom equipment, lots of pins and boards. Due to he got the stuff for free, and apparently also could get help to melt it for free, he actually made a profit of I think $700-900 from all the gold content from one or two whole cabinets of electronic equipment. Then he had to pay wages to the people who extracted the pins too.

 

I see the current price is $1300 per ounce of gold, I presume that is for 24 carat. If we pretend that you can melt down that $39 Pentium Pro and extract the gold without any additional costs, it means you need to find 0.03 oz (about 0.9 gram) of pure gold on the pins. According to The Internetz, the Pentium Pro is the vintage CPU with most gold content, up to 1 gram which should mean that you just go even on the process. That is also excluding shipping costs, any deductions and fees from whoever buys the gold and so on.

 

Now if you had a box of free PPro's with bent pins, perhaps you could make yourself some money by recycling them but buying them first sounds like a bad business. In particular from the one asking $100. Sure, if you are a CPU collector it might be a worthy buy but not if you're intending to melt it down and at best selling the gold for $40, perhaps $50 if the rate goes up. The gold price was higher one or two years ago than it is today, probably related to the state of the world economy.

 

Actually if you would be into the business of recycling for gold, there are a few selling Pentium Pro in the range of $20-25, at which you might actually end up with a few cents profit after all the expenses for recycling it are paid, assuming you don't have the resources to do it all by yourself on your spare time. If you're really thrifty and skilled, perhaps you'll even make a profit of $10 per CPU?

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/301247027475

[+Gemintronic]

I remember the Pentium Pros being expensive and slow. M$ was blamed because 16-bit. I don't really know how true that was.

[TPA5]

 

Sounds like they're all currently a bargain. Buy them all up and become King in the soon-to-be Mad Max world where pentium pro cpu's and cans of tuna fish are the currencies of the future

 

I feel like water is the safest bet for future currency.

[bkrownd]

some reason the pro's have this unique ora around them, server class hardware back then was a thing to behold as the state of the art bad ass thing, instead of a pentium (non mmx) with a pile of cache slapped on, making them mostly worthless outside of processing a large que of user requests.

 

PPros are are BIG chips, which is awesome. I had several old dual-PPro workstations crunching folding@home around 2000. Some of the PPro aura was from that one big 6xPPro motherboard. Some SMP hobbyists just had to get one of those 6-processor beasts, to say that they'd done it.

Edited July 24, 2014 by bkrownd

[Rybags]

In practically all cases, it's only economical to harvest the gold from electronics by doing it in bulk.

 

The stuff can be drawn/rolled/pounded down to a few atoms thickness, so most applications only use cents worth of it.

[TPA5]

I feel sorry for these Pentium Pro CPUs.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=Pentium+pro&_pgn=2&_skc=200&rt=nc

 

They're being put on display, in a meat market, to be consumed in the fiery hell of a gold recycler to make jewelry for some illegitimate bitch kid of a rich movie "star".

 

Instead they should be coveted for the vast powerhouses they were back in the day. You know, if the internet were to be disrupted and damaged. These chips might be the only computational devices left. And they could theoretically bring tens of thousands of dollars each in a post apocalyptic dystopian society.

 

Today's kids are so high up on the tech food chain that if it were to break, they'd all hit the ground so hard they wouldn't be able to function. I mean like in the 1940's they invented the transistor and from that basic part you could build anything. But today, kids don't know what a transistor is. How are they expected to build anything from the ground up when all they know how to do is push shiny app icons and look like geniuses?!?!? WTF man.. this is crazy!!

 

 

You know, I like your rants Keatah. You find the most unique and interesting things to bitch about, and I can really get behind that haha

 

I'll definitely agree with your line about kids today being mostly ignorant about technology. To many it doesn't matter about why or how something works, all that matters is they have the phone/tablet/computer that whatever hip commercial tells them they want. When I was a kid, I was in awe that you could take sound and video and somehow copy it to a magnetic reel on a VHS tape, and then have that turn back into sound and video on the TV. I was (and am) fascinated by things that other people have long moved on from. Hell, even the idea that something like a command on a computer can be turned into invisible waves of data, shot into the empty darkness of space, and eventually land on the receiver dish of a fricking robot on Mars. Damn.

 

Problem is, the collective curiosity of this current generation of kids/teenagers appears to me to be so much lower than previous generations. I know that every generation says that, but honestly it truly does. I'm not very old, so I can't speak for much when I say this, but hearing my dads stories about being on the edge of the computer revolution and living through a time that changed the planet as we know it, it was curiosity that fueled so much of it. On his part, he jumped in with an Atari 400 (that he could barely afford, he missed more than a few meals to pay for it) and would stay up until 3 in the morning, catch a few hours of sleep then go to work. And really, it was personalities like that which propelled the industry.

 

Today, no one seems to care why things work the way they do. Like I said, I'm not very old and as such do not have much of the rich experiences many of you on Atari Age do. However I can remember in high school how frustrated I was with classmates or kids in the younger grades. They had little curiosity, and no wonder for anything but the next new tech toy.

 

But hell, maybe I was just born in the wrong time. Modern technology doesn't do much for me these days it seems, my interest lays in much older fare.

 

Anyway that was a tangent. The short version?

 

You bring up some good points, Keatah.

 

 

(But I don't think we'll be needing P-Pro's for Mad-Max currency anytime soon )

[Keatah]

If not for currency, then perhaps as hood ornaments or deflectors. They're beefy enough to handle road debris alright. And the pins can impale the bugs resulting in less washer fluid usage - good for the environment, right?

 

Back in my time kids were indeed curious how things work. Times were slower and a 10-year-old's "fast-running" simple brain had no option but to be interested in the world around it - a good thing. Today you've got them plugged into these stupid-making phones and tablets which exist only to transfer money from their parent's pocket to some anonymous developer. All the while being fed a constant stream of noise and advertisement. Entraining them to go faster and faster!

 

Back in my day we'd ask questions like how a roller coaster got UP the hill. And when we learned it was a motor we wanted to see it and the gears and see how powerful it was. And lacking some of those details we'd fill in the details on our own, like calculating how high and steep the climb was. Maybe we'd get lucky and observe the gears with a stopwatch and figure out the ratios or something. And when it got to the bottom we wanted to know if it was us or the Astronauts that experienced more G's. Today you ask a kid about that and they pull their finger out of their ass (and smear it on a touchscreen trying google it). And you still get a lazy apathetic wuhh-I-dunno, then their facetime alert buzzer goes off. Prelude to a 2-hour discussion on 30 different topics which overlap dinner time and benefits no one except the pharmaceutical companies selling headache medicine to the parents, and big data collecting semi-anonymous user habits and statistics for some unknown future purpose that we all secretly hope never arrives.

[Csonicgo]

To be honest the Pentium Pro did start a lot of conventions we still have today: a "RISC style" CISC processor, conditional moves to complement the conditional jumps, Out-of-Order Execution, and 36-bit PAE. However, it sucked when it came to new features that had to be turned on manually with programs like FASTVID for Quake and Doom, and it was slower than a Pentium with 16-bit code, which still dominated the industry at that time.

 

Personally, I've always liked the later P5s, such as the Pentium MMX, when it came to DOS programs, but the Pentium Pro is what started the ball rolling that gave us the new Core series.

Now if this lot were Pentium 4 processors, I'd totally be in agreement with smelting them, that is, if they aren't already melted from the insane temps they had.

[Keatah]

I remember the Pentium Pros being expensive and slow. M$ was blamed because 16-bit. I don't really know how true that was.

 

It is very true - in 16-bit it was the same as the standard Pentiums. But 32-bit code could be almost 40% faster. Not all that bad! Fantastic as a matter of fact. But like many CPUs it was ahead of its time.

 

On the other hand, you had real 32-bits going, this CPU was king of 3D rendering in games. And anything using 32-bit DOS Extender simply blasted by at lightspeed.

 

People need to remember this was a transitional microprocessor in that many new architectural features were introduced. Many of which had never been done before - and still with us today.

 

I remember being ridiculously infatuated with the then "groundbreaking" non-blocking backside L2 cache and DIB. I always wondered what a classic computer (8-bitter) would perform like if it had such a feature.

 

TRIVIA: The RocketChip and ZipChip CPU-replacement MCMs for the Apple 2 series have caches.

TRIVIA: At introduction, the Pentium Pro (1MB cache) cost $2675

 

For your reading enjoyment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro

Pentium Pro Processor datasheet 24276905.pdf

Pentium Pro Processor (1MB cache) datasheet 24357001.pdf

p6tour.pdf

VS440FX Motherboard technical product specification 28181203.pdf

 

If anyone has hi-res versions of these pics I'd sure like to get them. Print them and frame them to go with my legacy build-up!

 

My VS440FX, rather nicely laid out for the era.

[TheRealAnubis]

The eBay auction that made me cringe was the 6581 SID chip (c64 sound chip) with all the legs cut off and a hole drilled in it to make a keychain... Shudder....