The History of a Dream: How the Ultimate PC Has Evolved In 15 Years

Posted 07/29/2010 at 11:14am | by Gordon Mah Ung and Alex Castle

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As we worked on this years 15th Dream Machine, we couldn't help but think about how far we've come. From the original 200MHz, 8MB-of-RAM 1996 Dream Machine up to this years 12-core, 24-thread, 24-gigs-of-RAM version, the ultimate computer has grown exponentially more powerful. But that's not much of a shocker (we've all heard about Moore's Law, and all) so we decided to delve deeper into the history of the Dream Machine. We collected data about the vital statistics of each years machine, and made a bunch of graphs showing how they've grown. (You can also see our 2004 predictions for this years Dream Machine here!) Some of what we found out surprised even us.

Keep reading for all the charts, as well as our thoughts about why they look the way they do. And since it wouldn't be any fun if we couldn't gawk at the old beige-box beasts, we've included a gallery of every year's Dream Machine cover at the end.

Processor

Since almost every Dream Machine has featured the fastest CPU available you can see the influence of clock speeds over the last 14 years. From Pentium to Pentium II and Pentium III clock speeds grew pretty slowly. In 1999, for our basic build it, we used a simple 500MHz Pentium III when a faster 650MHz chip was available. But fast forward to 2001 and you see the influence of the Pentium 4 and the NetBurst microarchitecture. Bred by Intel to climb to higher clock speeds rather pack in more instructions per clock, Dream Machines with NetBurst took off like a rocket from 2001, to 2002, 2003 and finally peaked in 2004. That year,  we took a stock 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560 and clocked it up to a stable 3.97GHz. Yeah, those Prescott’s really clocked up something fierce eh? Not. 

That 90nm Prescott signaled the end of NetBurst. Intel’s 3.8GHz Pentium 4 570 would be the end of the line for the clock speed race. The next year saw clock speeds plummet back to earth yet we still saw higher performance. In 2005, we built a dual-Opteron machine with clock speeds of 2.2GHz. and the clock speeds have pretty much stabilized since then. 

Here we take into account the overclocked speeds of each Dream Machine. It pretty much reflects the same pattern we saw with the stock CPU clocks. From Pentium to Pentium III the clock speeds gradually increased and then took off like a rocket with the Pentium 4. What’s really interesting is the our flatlining from 2008 to 2010 at 4GHz. Much of that is due to the platform we choose. In 2008, we featured another dual-processor machine using a pair of Xeon, ahem, Core 2 QX9775 chips. In 2009, in a world being swept away by financial disaster, we were happy to have electricity to power the Dream Machine. And we were happy to take our 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition to 4GHz – the point where it would pass our stress tests.

Look at this chart and then look at the one that shows the climb of clock speed. It’s no coincidence that in 2004, when the Pentium 4 hit the wall at 1,000MPH that we started to see the push for more cores. In 2005, we used a dual, dual-core machine.  The year after, a dual-core Core 2 Extreme X6800. From there, we’ve been trying to get as many cores in the Dream Machine as possible. This year’s is truly triumphant though with 12 cores and well, another 12 virtual cores thrown in for good measure.

RAM

It may look flat, but the chart is deceiving. The amount of system RAM has increased exponentially several times. Hell, 8MB in 1991! Seriously? We do admit, there were some long stretches where system RAM did not increase. It’s one of the things that led Intel to push so hard for Rambus in the late 1990s. You see, since main memory wasn’t going to explode, users were going to need the super duper fast Direct RDRAM which offered incredible bandwidth. Yes, you can be a hater on Rambus and Direct RDRAM (we were once the same) but RDRAM was actually ahead of its time and it is a shame politics and legal shenanigans muddied it up. It took DDR several generations and years to surpass the first iteration of PC800 RDRAM in performance.  The Dream Machine actually featured RDRAM in 2000, 2001, and the most insane implementation of it in 2002. That’s the year that we used a crazy 512MB RIMM4200/PC1066 module. In essence, the RIMM4200 module combined two RIMMs into one to give you dual-channel performance in one slot. Ultimately, the idea was to have two dual-channel RIMM4200 modules in a PC that would give you a PC with quad-channel memory. Alas, we know how that ended. By 2003, Dream Machine moved on to DDR and never looked back. Our write up in 2002 even acknowledged that the days of RDRAM in the PC were done for once DDR emerged. DDR, DDR2 and DDR3 are the lingua franca of today’s PC. 

You should also note that main memory is tied into the OS. That spike you see in 2005 came from the use of a dual-core, dual Opteron machine (dual’s usually demand more RAM than single processor machines) and our dual booting of Windows XP Pro and 64-bit Windows XP Pro. Of course, 64-bit became more of a reality with the introduction of 64-bit versions of Vista (Windows XP 64-bit was nothing more than a science experiment and even we recognized that) in 2006. But the resistance to Windows Vista was so high, that we bypassed 64-bit Vista in favor of Windows XP Professional. Things were still so bad for Windows Vista in 2007, that Dream Machine 2007 dual-booted the machine with the primary OS being Windows XP. This kept the system RAM down at 2GB, albeit, high-clocked. We weren’t comfortable with Windows 64-bit Vista until 2008 when we finally used it as the primary OS for the Dream Machine. With its 64-bit capability and most of the early bugs squashed by SP1, it was finally the primary OS in Dream Machine 2008 which featured 8GB of RAM for its dual processor configuration.

Up Next: video cards, power supplies, price, and the gallery.