Ehh...computer-stuff wise:
Cyrix 6x86 Pr166 - ran moderately well doing humdrum tasks. Oh my god don't throw anything in 3d at it (games-wise). Suddenly it's like having a '486/sx-16 again. I was so happy the day I got a real P200MMX I threw that chip in the garbage.
Not exactly a fair comparison. The chip you've mentioned ran at only slightly more than half the speed of the Intel chip you mentioned.
Intel stopped developing the original Pentium at 233Mhz. I have a Cyrix 6x86 PR333 that will walk all over any original Pentium.
Once AMD decided to move to Socket7 and introduced the K6-2, AMD processors operated up to twice as fast as Pentium processors and benchmarked even better.
The last Socket 7 processors I owned were AMD K6-2+ and K6III+ processors. These would uniformly run at 550 Mhz (with built in processor caches that Intel processors lacked). Some of these processors would run at 600Mhz and I even had one at 612.
In virtually any Pentium compatible board there is a non Intel processor that will work better in it (or can be BIOS modded to work) and these processors best Intel's limited Pentium line.
I inherited one of the P200MMX processors you've mentioned from a customer upon upgrading his system. Every benchmark I made on that processor was, frankly, pitiful compared to Cyrix and AMD processors I already had.
As a former Motorola fanatic, its depressing seeing this kind of pro-Intel BS on an Amiga website.
If IBM had not outsourced all the components of their first consumer oriented computer (the PC), then Intel (a company building processors that had 1/4 the performance per Mhz of their competitors products) would never have gained the undeserved promenance they have.
The original 8088? An 8 bit memory bus verion of the 8086 that at 4.77 Mhz performed on par with a 1Mhz 6809 or 6502.
The 80186? Only commonly found in the non-IBM compatible Tandy 2000.
The 80286? A little improvement, but once Windows3.x came out you needed at least a 386.
386SX and 486SX processors? Intel's brilliant idea of selling processors with disabled features. Want to upgrade your 486SX? That socket you plug your upgrade into totally replaces the crippled 486SX with a full 486DX.
Does anybody remember that the original Pentium processor had a bug (although admittedly an unlikely one to cause problems)?
Pentium Pro? Definitely to be forgotten. Apparently even Intel though so since the next processor was named Pentium II.
I won't abuse the PII or PIII as they were relatively well executed. While they were concurrent the original Athlon and the PIII ran a neat race to >1Ghz (Won by AMD).
Then Intel returned to seriously screwing up - the Pentium IV. I knew there was something wrong when the last Pentium IIIs outperformed higher speed P4s. Intel's misinterpretation of Moore's Law led them to believe they'd be able to get the P4 to 10Ghz.
Netburst architecture was responsible for Intel's product line being outperformed by their competitor's. Until they threw out the entire idea, and introduced a new line branching from their mobile processors the only way Intel could claim to have the highest performing processor was to tack a 2meg Xeon cache onto the P4 and sell it for $1000. Anybody that buys Intel's top end processors must really enjoy pain, because those incredibly overpriced chips will rapidly be rendered obsolete.
So tell me, what was it that made you think Intel was such a great buy?
