What was your most significant CPU upgrade?

[Hugo Drax]

6502 cpu to an 8086. It was a huge jump in performance.

 

[K7SN]

6502 cpu to an 8086. It was a huge jump in performance.

Yup - 8086 to 82086 was my choice; perhaps while I had a lot of programming invested in my OSI C1P and Apple ][ both 6502 but also an Heathkit H11 with a 16 bit LSI-11 so I really didn't make a jump until I put them on the shelf the three computers on the shelf. (Still have the Apple, donated the other two where as far as I know they are still running. The H11 was the last computer I built if you call putting together a kit building. Both IMHO 6502 to 8086 and 8086 to 82086 were leaps greater than a Pentium or AMD equivalent were to the next generation just like a quad core i3 to a quad core Xeon is again IMHO a at most a 30% increase but the jumps from 6502 to 8086 to 82086 were well over a 100% improvements.

 

[Hulk]

I probably should have included my first computer which was an Atari 800 with a 6502 running at 1.79MHz. The jump from this to the Intel 486 SX25 was by far my most significant CPU upgrade. We're probably talking about 2 orders of magnitude in integer performance.

 

[iSkylaker]

My dad had an AMD Duron I think it was, around 2001~2002, all I remember it ran at 900Mhz then he got an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ for the socket 939 around 2005-2006. We felt it as a huge upgrade because I used it as much as him lol, I used to play the popular games around that time (Vice City, Max Payne) as well and play around with image editing software. The Athlon X2 was in a perfect time for the release of San Andreas.

My dad passed away in 2008 and I keep it until late 2012 when I got me an i5-3570.

 

[sammy sung]

Significant I have two for different reasons

Upgraded from i7 870 to i5 4670K so I wouldn't bottleneck crossfire R9 290's. Then a year later when my day job involved me editing 1-2 fifteen minute videos daily, I upgraded to my i7 5930K

Also upgraded from a P4 3ghz to a Q6600. But I definitely felt the difference of the other two more as my gaming/work load dictated it

 

[alecmg]

E8600 dualcore to 2500k sandy
before that PIII 450MHz to Athlon64 3000+ 1,8GHz

 

[tb77]

I7 4930k -> 2x Xeon 2687w v2

 

[parkerface]

I've had several major CPU upgrades over the years. The most notable was probably the first upgrade.

I was six or seven years old when my father brought home some kind of 286 workstation that had a whopping 6mb of ram. Played Rocky's Boots on that for hours. I wasn't allowed to use any of the other workstations he brought home after that one, so I stuck with my trusty Nintendo and Super Nintendo consoles.

A few years later he built an AMD 486 DX4 100 based system for me. Got my first taste of DOOM multiplayer over serial cable--what an eye opener that was.

Following upgrades were:

486 DX4 100 to Pentium 166 (Quake!!)
Pentium 166 to Celeron 300a (obviously overclocked)
Celeron 300a to Pentium 3 750
Pentium 3 750 to Athlon 64 X2 4400 (another big step up in performance)
Athlon 64 X2 4400 to Phenom X4 9500 (Complete turd of a processor, but was free)
Phenom X4 9500 to i5 4670k (current system)

So yeah.. I tend to sit on systems for a few years. With how much slower CPU speeds are advancing lately, I have no idea when I'll actually need to upgrade again.

 

[MountainKing]

P3 1Ghz 512MB RAM 30GB HDD to C2D E6600, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD! Now that was like night and day!

 

[NTMBK]

My laptop moved from an AMD C60 to an Intel i5-4300Y. Hell of an improvement.

 

[JimmiG]

6502 @ 1 MHz -> 68020 @ 14 MHz
68020 @ 14 MHz -> 68030 @ 50 MHz
68030 @ 50 MHz -> Pentium @ 133 MHz
Pentium @ 133 MHz -> K6-2 @ 400 MHz
K6-2 @ 400 MHz -> Athlon @ 900 MHz
Athlon @ 900 MHz -> Athlon XP @ 1600 MHz

After that it started tapering off and the gains became less significant. I had the Athlon 64 @ 2200 MHz at some point, then Athlon X2, Phenom, Phenom II. All pretty incremental upgrades.

I guess the most recent jump from the Phenom II @ 3.7 GHz to the 4770K @ 4.5 GHz was pretty big.

 

[lixlax]

For me it was probably Athlon64 3500+(2,2GHz) to Athlon64 X2 4000+(2,1GHz)- double the amount of cores with the same IPC and similar clockspeeds. Phenom II X4 965 to FX 8320 has to be close second- this doubled the core amount once again at similar frequency, but BD's IPC was a little bit lower.

After the FX 8320 came my biggest and only CPU downgrade to Athlon X4 860K which I'm using now.