your favorite processor. old or new.

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6502.

c64/c128

That's all I learned as far as assembly language. I'm far behind the times.

I had a lot of fun with the 68000, for a while

"Old programmers never die - they branch to a different address".

I'll get me coat...

When I were a lad, computers had vacuums, not t'other way around.



Pass me my coat and zimmerframe please Cornflake, help an old man to the door...

Yes indeed. PEBKAC, or "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair".
Much good software and hardware is let down by the wetware using it.

I'd be happy to, but the wheels are stuck on this cheap bath chair...

That made me chuckle.

Glad I'm from the era in which you don't shear Ram. Or make cakes with processors.

You fool! you know you could have just gotten the Phenom II x2 555, it's the same thing as the x4 955 after you unlock the 2 hidden cores for a much reduced price.

My favorite is the x2 545, because the performance for the price is incredible. Then it would be the AMD Athlon Thunderbird series because that was the first chip where you could overclock it like crazy and not worry about it dying or overheating.

Then I like the intel core 2 duo series, they really improved substantially from the previous generation, that was when intel really started to get things right with their processors. I imagine the i series of chips are really good too.

Anything from AMD. I find them much cheaper than Intel's chips and they have the best bang for the buck. AMD's top of the line Phenom II hex core processor is less than 200 dollars and runs at 3.4 ghz. Intel's top of the line i7 runs at around the same speed, but is almost 1,000 dollars.

The Pentium rather amazed me when it came out. It was also rather expensive

It had ultra-super-pipelining (something like that) and internal cache galore, it had a floating point unit included (although it had a small bug initially).

It ran about twice as fast as a 486 of the same clock speed. Actually, this used to be common, the 486 also ran about twice as fast as the 386, etc. Single cores don't quite do that anymore but we're also getting more cores per CPU, which must more than balance it out for truly parallizable (new word) operations.

All the new Intel families after Pentium seem like refinements of the original. The 486 was a big jump from the 386 too, but it didn't have nearly as much pipelining. Pipelining is neat

The z80, first time I hacked my TI-83. Nice, simple architecture.
It's the processor that taught me assembly. Seems kind of pointless now.

The Z80 was great. TI-83 is one of my favorite calculators, i have a TI-89 as well but i don't really like that it has a graphical interface to it. I never programmed in z80 assembly though, only TI-83 basic. I liked some of the quirks in TI-83 Basic... you didn't have to close parenthesis or quotation marks and this actually saved you a byte of program space and made your program run slightly faster.

HAHA, I still have a fully functioning 85mb HD which I purchased to dramatically boost my storage

lol, I remember saying "who the hell needs 1Gb of storage" back then . I found the box from our first PC (an Amstrad laptop with a monchrome display) a few months ago which had a large red sign on it proclaiming that it now included a huge 40mb hard drive. I think i was a 286 from memory. I am typing this on a computer with 1.5TB internal storage which seems obscene compared to 40mb! Our first computer was an Amstrad PCW based on the legendry Z80 but limited to 3.4Mhz running CP/M as the operating system with no internal storage and 512kb Ram even tho the Z80 could only access 64kb at a time though I remember there was a software workaround for this (it used 3" floppy disks as the storage medium which were loaded into the ram). This was the first machine I tried to programme using Mallard Basic.

I will always be fond of the original pre MMX pentium as for me thats when computers started to get really usable for "everyone" along with Win 95. I remember getting our 120mhz pentium and being blown away by its speed compared to my aunts 486DX4 which was purchased only months previously. I was never quite convinced by AMD and always found comparable intel silicon more stable for some reason.

Currently running a core i3 which I think is fantastic for its price point.

I was going to say Xeon E55xx series (because they can work in teams and are awesome when they do), but then i found out about this a while back, unfortunately Intel is only making 100 of them as a research project:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141688/Intel_unveils_energy_efficient_48_core_chip

(I used to code ASM for 6502 and tried dabbeling with it on the Mc68K, but i moved on to code applications once i hit the PC).

My first computer had an SC/MP II processor. It was a Science of Cambridge MK14.

It was truly awful.

Intel 4004
The one that started it all.