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486 Turns 15 Years Old
wooby writes "The 486 processor , introduced in 1989 at 25 and 33MHz clock speeds, is now 15 years old. Intel's simultaneous launch of both the 486, a CISC chip, and the i860, a RISC chip, was a gamble. Remarks Intel's former CEO, Andy Grove: 'our equivocation caused our customers to wonder what Intel really stood for, the 486 or i860?'"
15 years old and still routing my packets. :))
Three more years until she's legal!
I am really getting old, huh?
*sniff... memoorrriieesss....
I still remember my first 486 based machine. It had everything! :)
Soundcard, 256K videocard.
I was the king of the block.
Those where good times
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
To think that's when I graduated high school and I only just got my first CS job!!!!
mines still going strong, gotta love doom :]
I'm not familiar with the 1860. Could someone please post an overview and history of this?
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
BLURB
Intel's venerable 486 CPU is now 15-years-old. Intel began working on the 486 in the early 1980s, and introduced the chip in April of 1989. The 486 was essentially an improved, modified version of the 386. The 32-bit 486 was initially manufactured on a one micron process, and was introduced at speeds of 25 and 33MHz.
All 486 chips except for the "sx" versions came with a built-in floating-point unit and contained 8 KB of cache memory. The 486 was capable of 20 MIPS performance, and contained certain features (such as pipelining) which had previously been found in mainframes. As a result of these enhancements the 486 was theoretically able to execute one instruction per clock cycle. Today's processors have clockspeeds 100 times faster than the original 486, but the instructions per clock (IPC) of the latest CPUs isn't much better than the IPC of the 486. Intel also decided to release the 32-bit, superscalar i860 CPU, which was specifically designed for scientific applications, in 1989. In Only the Paranoid survive, Intel's former CEO Andy Grove recounts the dilemma of launching two largely incompatible CPUs at the same time:
We now had two very powerful chips that we were introducing at just about the same time: the 486, largely based on CISC technology and compatible with all the PC software, and the i860, based on RISC technology, which was very fast but compatible with nothing. We didn't know what to do. So we introduced both, figuring we'd let the marketplace decide. However, things were not that simple. Supporting a microprocessor architecture with all the necessary computer-related products - software, sales, and technical support - takes enormous resources. Even a company like Intel had to strain to do an adequate job with just one architecture. And now we had two different and competing efforts, each demanding more and more internal resources. Development projects have a tendency to want to grow like the proverbial mustard seed. The fight for resources and for marketing attention (for example, when meeting with the customer, which processor should we highlight) led to internal debates that were fierce enough to tear apart our microprocessor organization. Meanwhile, our equivocation caused our customers to wonder what Intel really stood for, the 486 or i860?
Compaq recommended to Intel that it abandon the i860 and concentrate all of its efforts on the 486. Microsoft pressured Intel to promote the i860, and strongly encouraged Intel to introduce an i860-based PC. Intel decided to emphasize the 486, and ended up selling hundreds of millions of 486 processors. It is intriguing to think of how different the computer industry would be today if Intel had decided to emphasize the i860 instead of the 486.
about how feeble a device that a 486 is today, and look at the PC in front of you now.
What will be sitting in its place 15 years from now? A.I. or bloatware?
Even though I'm currently boycotting Intel following their decision to enable Pentium III serial numbers, I still use my 486.
I have a 486 DX/33 box running Slackware Linux. It serves as my router, my firewall, my file server, my print server, my game server, and my media server. This is, without a doubt, the most useful box in all of boxendom.
Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Box Builder
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
Imagine a beowolf clu....
Oh. 15 years old, right.
Steal This Sig
Ahhh, those were the days..... Gorilla still ran at a decent speed, but then when these new fangled contraptions came around, the banana moved at the speed of light!
.....ah nevermind
If I promise to be a good boy can I have some better karma?
I still fondly remember my first experience with a 486. What was it? Watching a bad BSA propaganda video clip entitled "Don't copy that floppy." Sounds kinda dirty now but at the time the fact that I was watching real motion video on a PC screen was enough to make me forget the source.
My very 1st machine was an Acer 486/66 dx2 with 4 megs of ram and a 500 gig hd. I was about 12 at the time and the king of Dos :). Is it just me or were the games back then a lot more fun than they are now? I remember playing Doom, Leisure Suit larries, crystal caves, etc.
Logo and Basic.
Somehow i still prefer those simple joys of 15 years ago.
Wanted : A Signature.
It's a left-over from the Stone Age.
It's funny, but I can't seem to throw mine away...
I remember watching my brother show me his 386 with sound. Dr. Sbiatso and all that. It so blew me away that I saved every dime and got a 486 with a video capture card, sound card, modem, blah blah blah. Cost me $3,500 For two years, every almost waking spare moment I had was spent on that machine.
That experience made me what I am today. A Slashdot geek with an old 486.
Best Windows Freeware
She's legal in Canada. Age of consent is 14 here. I think the Liberals are trying to push it down to 13, the pervs.
:-)
But in all seriousness, my college room-mate had a 386 and then replaced it with a 486. A guy on our floor had a 486 with tape drives and the works. That was great until someone hit his room with a leaner and hosed his whole backup system (which was on the floor). For all you who don't know what a leaner is, it's when someone fills a garbage can with water and tilts it against someone's door. When they open it, the water splooshes over everything, especially them. Pretty nasty! We used mirrors to check for leaners so they never got us.
Bah, I went from a 286, to a P-133 and then up from there, regularly. Nostalgia time. {{ahhhh}}
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Later in the year, IBM introduced an upgrade kludge 486 piggy-back board that could be shoehorned into their 386-based PS/2 Model 80s. However, IIRC, these all had to be recalled due to the bugs in the early 486s.
End users didn't get to see a significant number of correctly functioning 486 systems until early in 1990.
BTW, if you ever saw the processor specs for the i860, its byzantine complexity made the x86 architecture look clean and elegant. There's no wonder it never took off.
A better mousetrap is a term used to reflect a certain phase in a life of product-type. It basicly means that the product has been developed to a point where it fullfills its purpose with ease and all further improvements become unnecessary and unprofitable. When it comes to IT, I would say that applications like word processors and beginning to fall in the better mousetrap -gategory. Many people I know use word97 for example. Perhaps the OS/GUIs are experiensing the same thing. With CPUs it seems to be a different story tho. Both intel and AMD are pulling nice profits and both the sales volume and speed of CPUs is increasing at a rapid pace. I wonder how much CPU power would be enough to make further improvements unattractive to buyers. I would bet we are talking about multi-core quantum (or whatever shall be) cpus with the mainmemory on-die.
Pretty RISCy maneuver, eh?
My 486 DX2 still soldiers on, with its Orchid (I feel ancient now) video card and ISA Slots. It works as a good router for the network, but as of late has been having problems with the motherboard solder connections and corrosion (tin components). Sniff...I will miss that ol' clunker when it dies.
I found the "Any" key.
Forget the King of Dos. Having that harddrive, you would have been the King of file storage!
15 years old eh? I remember buying my first computer in '92. I was told that it was the state-of-the-arts, brand new, top of the range, 386 system. And now to be told that 486 was around since '89... I knew that I should have trusted my 2nd hand car salesman over that computer guy.
Or at least the one I had was. In a failed attempt to install a faster cyrix chip, I managed to bend the pins of my SX/33 significantly, and then bend them back with my finger(ah, those were the days, when I ordered my p4 through the mail a few years ago, it was delivered with a bent pin, and it took me about an hour wiht a pair of tweezers to bend it back), and I dropped it on the shag carpeting in my house, got a pin stuck, and just ripped it right out, no problem :P
Though my friend managed to cook one by plugging it in backwards, he said the chip glowed red. And after it was cooled back down a small chunk just fell off.
My 486SX-25MHz with 6MB (upgraded from 2!) of RAM and 110MB Seagate drive still runs like the day I bought it. I have reduced it to menial tasks such as routing the packets for the entire house.
Its a tough little sucker though, for the heck of it one day, I installed Starcraft and Bryce 3D 4.0 on it.
Both ran.
I'm not sure if the i860 was the failure that everyone is saying it was. This may be true on the desktop, but it was a fairly popular processor in the embedded world for offloading computation.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Well, given the problems that people had getting general workloads to run on the i860, probably almost nowhere...
But this always raises the question of what the world might have looked like if intel had dropped the ball and forced the PC world to abandon the x86 world in favor of another architecture. Given the time frame, the other architecture would almost certainly have been RISC. Who would have won, and why? And how would the world look now if we had the descendents of the MC86000, Sparc, or MIPS R3000?
Such a pleasant dream for such a pleasant Saturday...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
My brother still has the 486 I learned on.
First commands he ever taught me:
C:\>qbasic
FILE->OPEN "GORILLA.BAS" ->F5.
YEAH!
I remember when it was first released the 486 was billed as the "Cray on a chip." There's just no underestimating the hubris of marketing.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Well, at least they learn from their mistakes... :)
I always wanted to have sex with 16 year olds when I was 6. Damn age of consent laws stopped me everytime though :P
I still have a 486SX-25MHz, you insensitive clod!
And it still works too! Woot! One of the things I've noticed is that the user interface really hasn't changed all that much since Win3.1 (or MacOS) was introduced, particularly the speed of interaction. It takes as long for me to perform a task (say, create and print a letter) on that 486 with Win3.1 as it takes me on a 1.7GHZ P4 with Fedora Core 2. Sure, stuff looks nicer and there's a ton more features. But it really hasn't gotten any faster to perform the everyday mundane tasks.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
for the price of those machines back then, I'll take my sub $1000 pc anytime. Ok, so I am just jealous because I never could afford a $2500 486, but I sure did want one. I bought every issue of PC Shopper just to look at the specs!
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
I'd wait for the day the Pentium turns 15. I remembered the days of the popular Pentium bugs that affected various 60-100Mhz versions.
And who'd forget the classic that went something like...
The Pentium was not officially named 586 because 486+100 turned out to be 585.9999999999999.
I think the Intel 80486 CPU will be considered a great CPU, though it pales in comparison to the more significant importance of the 80386, Pentium, Pentium II, and Pentium 4 CPU's.
The 80386 is definitely important because 1) it introduced the 32-bit flat memory model, something that subsequent Intel CPU's incorporated, and 2) it could virtualize 8086 sessions, which made it possible to run multiple programs safely (remember what a breakthrough QEMM-386 plus DESQview was?).
The improvements that the 80486 brought was essentially a built-in FPU unit and faster clock speeds.
Of performing 80% of the functions that most people use a computer for. Its this unending stream of old computers like the 486 that brings access to the internet down to the level of even the lowest income person.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Here's the link
15 turns 486 years old!
I remember the ARM 250 on my old Acorn back in the early nineties. [Sigh] Those were the days.
Hmm... maybe it's finally time to upgrade.
I would feel that the release of the 386 was much more significant of a technology release then the 468.
I mean really, the 486 was just an overblown 386 anyway, it wasn't a true 'advancement' like it was from the 286...
Or i suppose anytime we jump to a wider word....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I do believe that if someone did that to me back in college, id have pounded them into the next life. Especially if they ruined any of my equipment..
14 is the age of consent? Have you guys mentioned this to the UN? They might take issue with that, since you are also under various treaties, as we are down south of you.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
yeah, i still remember my 486. my first pc was the XT, then went to some 386, which was nice, but the 486, oh !!! to me the 486 still resembles my favorite pc of all time, it was quick (was a dx2/66 i think) text based apps in dos, was stable, and it was fun screwing with it to optimize memory usage... I think that's why I still have this affinity towards text based apps, for their stability and speed, which has it's origin with the 486 apps...thus linux/bsd! Hmm, wonder if I have that old thing lying around somewhere...
--
Press any key to continue or any other key to quit
Our 486 had 16MB of ram, which I thought was bordering on absurd at the time. I didn't know anyone else with more than 4MB. But when time came to do a video for a class project, I did all the sound editing on that thing. For the 7-minute video, we had about 9MB of audio, and so I was able to edit it effortlessly with the Sound Blaster software.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
It's dangerous dave people ;)
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/105
Doom, Doom2, Slackware. My weekends were full and the neighbors terrified at the screams of cacodemons and blasts of chaingun and shotgun fire. And the sreams of frustration over X STILL not set right and another "vi XF86config". Then the YAHOO! IT WERKS! I GOT IT UP! Uh X I mean...... I had more real fun and learned more on that 66mz 486. Slackware was my first Linux and Doom my first real gaming. I was also 45.
Oy!
Don't take that 'pcmech' website the article links to very seriously. It's an interesting read, but contains so much stuff that is downright *wrong* as to be good for a laugh.
"Despite this, the 186 never found itself in a personal computer."
Bullshit. I owned one. Made by PCTech. Yes, the same one that made the buggy IDE chipset we all know from our kernel configuration sessions. Ironic in that the 186 motherboard they made had onboard SCSI. Quite the piece of work for ~1987.
"The 286 was the first 'real' processor."
Ummmmmmmm...Whatever you say.
"it could not switch back to real mode without a warm reboot."
Bullshit. I guess exiting Windows 3x on a 286 and going back to that DOS prompt was a figment of my imagination.
That's only halfway down the first page. It only gets worse.
There is only 1 classic Pentium joke worth knowing:
I am Pentium of Borg.
Precision is Futile.
Prepare to be Approximated.
The 486 was a huge advancement over the 386. Take a look at the instruction cycle counts of the two chips, plus it had the first integrated FPU in the x86 series. Unfortunately, because of the 486SX (SX = sucks), programmers were unable to rely on the presence of hardware floating-point.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
From age 18 until 21, you're expected to try to
:-)
get laid. In case you're too ugly or dumb for that,
we take pity on you by allowing you to buy porn.
The idea is to encourage good adult relationships.
(married, hetero, consent, no rape, no S+M, etc.)
Such relationships lead to happy children.
Tough luck if you just want to be a perv.
You may already know this, but for the benefit of some of our other readers...
When trapped in your room by a live leaner, crack the door open a little bit, then snap it closed. If you do it right, the leaner will be diffused.
Then make sure you find who did it and penny them into their rooms. That's a lot harder to open from the inside ;)
These machines cost near to nothing nowadays, is it still possible to decently run X+browser+some apps on such a machine to keep them out of recycling for a bit longer? I've heard of the RULE (run uptodate linux everywhere) project, any other suggestions?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Yessir, the build took a while, but now I'm ready to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor. Wonder if that LAN party next week will use token ring or thinnet?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
They have invented a successor to the abortion pill, RU486. It's called RUPentium, and causes embryo cells not to divide correctly.
The CMOS of my old 486DX2-66 clearly displays June 12, 2004.
It passed through the millenium without a hitch!
At least some versions of the i860 had the same
MMU as the Pentium. Using the MMU for paging was
horribly difficult though, because the i860 did
not handle faults well. The OS got stuck with the
job of emulating many partially completed instructions.
Intel used the i860 in the Paragon supercomputer,
which ran a SysV UNIX OS.
Mercury Computer Systems used the i860 on VME
boards with a circuit-switched crossbar interconnect that did 160 megabytes/second
(40 MHz, 4 bytes wide) half-duplex to each node.
That's 1.28 Gb/s, many years ago. They sold the
system with a matrix math library for doing
radar and similar tasks.
I think the non-MMU version got used in printers.
The constant race between AMD & Intel and Nvidia & ATI to make their products faster has undoubtedly been good for their bottom-line, but is it promoting laziness in programmers?
In the pre-PC days (and to a certain extent games consoles today), the hardware platform remained static for the life of the product. Compare the software released at the beginning of it's life compared to the end - it's streets ahead, particularly games. Coders had no choice but to continually optimise their code, learn new tricks etc. With the advance in PC hardware there isn't the same motivation. You know that when you start a project that by the time it's released the 'average' platform will be more powerful. Won't run on smoothly on a 2.6GHZ P4 with 32MB graphics card? No problem, we'll put that as the minimum spec and recommend something higher.
I still use my Mac Quadra 650 (33MHz, 128MB RAM, 9GB SCSI HD, 512k VRAM) as a scanning station for an old Agfa SCSI scanner (that cost me $1400, back in '94). It's running OS 7.6.1 (circa 1995-6 OS), Photoshop 2.5, and Illustrator 5.5. The thing has a steel case that I can stand on and has never had any hardware failure. Good stuff!
I drank what? -- Socrates
No, the Acorn Archimedes is the system of the future, it uses RISC, the CPU architecture of the future, and the RISC OS beats your pathetic GEM.
I really could swear that when my father bought a 33 MHz 486DX in 1991, my friend had a 20 MHz 486SX. He also told me it was a step-up from the 16 MHz version. Am I remembering this correctly? I really believe that the 486 was available at 16, 20, 25, 33, and 50 MHz in DX form by the end of 1991 at the latest. Did Intel only introduce the 16 and 20 MHz parts after the 25 and 33 MHz parts? I remember how amazing that behemoth 486DX 'full tower' my dad had for his drafting business felt back then. It had a whopping 128K of external cache in little SRAM chips on the motherboard too!
The original Beowulf cluster was 486-based.
It had 16 machines.
So, I really don't have anything to add, just to point out that you don't even have to convert old 486s into routers or something - they can do basic computer tasks just fine on their own. I can't play Quake on mine, but I can do everything else.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
ummmm no. That was the engineering sample Pentiums. Very different CPU in many ways.
i was using a 486 untill the hard drive crashd i have since upgraded to a 6 year old gateway with a 200megahertz pentium chip
I was using an Atari ST but I lost interest in GEM and eventually MINIX ST took it over. My next computer computer was a 68010 running Systev V R.3 (with BSD demand-paging grafted on) which was my first UNIX system, the MINIX ST conversion came after that. I bought my first 368 as a used Tandy computer and promptly put MINIX on that too (it actually came with MicroSoft XENIX on it but I wanted a source code UNIX.) A little after that I started hearing about this new Linux thing and I had vague plans that I would move the 368 to that but then the power supply blew and that delayed me. During the delay I started to use NetBSD on computers at work and so when I bought my first 486 (a 66 MHz screamer with 32-bit VL bus buslogic SCSI and ET-4000-w32p VL bus video, heh) I loaded it with NetBSD 0.8 not Linux. I stopped using a 486 per-se when I upgraded it to a 83 MHz Pentium (a "clock-halfed" 166 MHz CPU.) The box was given to a friend to work in her office. She put Windoze on it but hey it wasn't my problem.
The 486 my family had was the king of 486 when we got it. DX2-66, 256 KB L2 (upgradable), 16 MB of RAM, 400 MB HD, 2 MB Diamond Viper video card, Sound Blaster 16, and the Anykey keyboard that scared the hell out of me when I managed to remap all the keys wrong and couldn't remember how to fix it. Ahh, youth.
The OS would write a code address into a location
where the BIOS knew to look, then reset the CPU.
The BIOS would run, notice this, and then transfer
control back the the OS. (the OS was still in memory)
I kid you not. The CPU needed a reset for going
back into real mode.
15 years. fuck me. is that all?
In no particular order:
- 2400 baud modems / Hayes SmartModems
- Downloading shareware from dailup Bulletin Boards
- BBS's with Internet e-mail, fetching files via e-mail FTP commands
- Manually configuring IRQ's on ISA cards
- Mastering config.sys and autoexec.bat
- 14-inch monitor with 640x480 display
- AT command strings / {COMMO} software
- TSRs "Terminate and Stay Resident" programs
- Xmodem, Ymodem and Zmodem protocols
- UMB, EMM, XMS and all that DOS memory mgmt
- UUENCODE
- GOPHER
- 486SX/25 was easily overclocked to 33 mHz!
- BBS Doors, like VGA Planets
- ANSI graphics
- Everything had its own ISA card!
- Friends and relatives were actually impressed that you built and configured your very own computer!
my 2.4Ghz is what, a 33 x4 x4 x~4. I bet the core sped ir really only 33 without marketing and we just finally now have good enough disk/video/sound co-processors for it to be efficient. lol.
Damn, you beat me too it. I don't have mod points, so....
MOD PARENT UP +1 Intereresting/Informative!
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
I still have one, a 16 MB machine, in my basement. It runs Linux (Redhat 5.2) and for years now has been my packet radio machine. It sits there all day and you know what? 16 million clock cycles per second is plenty to send a few bytes per second through the (iamginary) ether utterly reliably and with plenty of power to spare.
And:
- No cooling fan to break
- Very low power
The 486 was a fantastic chip, and is still great today.
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
...of course the better CPU lost the market, as usual.
I'm still using my old IBM PS/1 I got when I was in high school as my NAT. It just works, period. 8 MB of ram (started with 4) and no harddrive running FloppyFW. I think there was even a 16 Mhz version besides my 20, but I'm not sure.
I bought my first PC, an Intel 486dx2-66 in early '95. I had Windows 3.11 WFW and the thing sucked so bad that I almost decided to return it or put it in the closet, just not use it. Opening applications would crash the system! Nevermind its "multitasking." And then a friend said, "You may want to try out OS/2" Wow, it was not my computer that sucked it was my OS! In learning why this superior OS was not more popular I got to hate M$, even though I did tech support for Windows '95 - for M$("Saving the world one PC at a time" is the way I looked at it). With OS/2 I could start a Windows 3.1 emultation session, max its system resources, do the same again, minimize that, play Heretic or Doom (without sound) and even though switching took a few seconds, I could download with an OS/2 app and the download would keep on going, woo hoo!! Once I made Windows not my primary OS I have had much fun working with computers.
One of my friends commented how much today's OSs suck since we used to run OS/2 Warp on a 486dx4-120 on 32 MB RAM as snappily as Windows XP on a Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM does today. Now I smile because I have more RAM (768) than my first HDD had space (420) and I have more video memory (64) than my first computer had memory (12) and the fact that if RAM cost the same as when I had my first computer (~$40/MB) I'd have over $30,000 in memory.
Anyway, I ditched Warp when it became apparent to me IBM did not care and I ditched Red Hat for Debian about three years ago when I decided that Debian's interests matched mine more than Red Hat's did. Thank you for letting me share.
Moderators on crack again.
I remember when these came out, friends and I joked about how much heat these put off and how they needed heat sinks. The funny part was we were all like, "whats next, having fans attached directly to the CPU, hahahahaaha". ;)
I'm currently building a distro that will make these still useful.
Heck, you young whippersnappers! I had an 8086, Compaq portable. Weighed 30 pounds, 2 5 1/4" floppy drives. I upgraded it to a V20 chip, 640k of ram, and a RLL hard drive, and it smoked! ;)
it WAS a joke... I think you need to lighten up a bit.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hubble got an upgrade a few years ago from a 60's mainframe chip to a 486. I'm not sure how that affects its capabilities, but the stunning photographs that first made it famous predate the upgrade.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
The incompatibility was IBM's fault. Whoever wrote the original BIOS for the IBM PC, used a bunch of Intel reserved interrupt vectors for various BIOS functions. The reserved vectors were not used by the 8086/8, they were used in later Intel processors. If you can find an original Intel 8086/8 data book, the reserved vectors are clearly listed.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Does anyone know why it was called the 8086, 80386, etc?
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
I purchased an old 486 to use a router a while back --- ran great and not slow for freebsd.
It actually had a y2k bug in the bios -- this caused problems for a little until I set the date to 1995 and added 5 years to the freebsd date -- worked like a champ, no probs after that
I remember in 1998 one of my friends had a 486 running windows 3.1, while in my home I had a Cyrix PR200 mhz with 32mb ram running Win95. His pc was much slower than mine, win3.1 was dog slow.
As you upgrade lately you are getting diminishing returns, but you are overstating things. Try using a 486 with win 3.1 sometime and you will see.
that article says the 486s had 8kb of cache. The DX4s actually had 16kb. That's why they could almost keep up with a Pentium
Most binary Linux distributions are compiled for the 386. Not that you'd ever notice the speed difference, but it just seems silly.
ive picked up a cpu or two and found bent pins, think the first was off of eBay (233 MMX, oo fun)
well, i noticed a pin was indeed bent, and i used some firm cardboard (not too thick, not too thin) and bent it into place, slowly...give it a lil tug, then eyeball it to see if its in either row of the other pins. worked great. beats the crap out of using metal tweezers.
Moores law basicly makes sure we get to keep doing this for a while until atomic or quantum effects get in the way (not long now ...)
Actually the 486 is a pretty boring chip to lionize - the 386 was a major architecture change (as were the RISC chips growing up around it) following the mistep into segmentation that was the 286. Intel had this capability architecture jag going for a while which tended to cloud their vision a little - the 286/432/960 all had leanings in that direction, some a little more exterme than others ... the problem was that to use those sorts of architectures in anger you need strongly typed languages that can manipulate pointers (or segments etc) as a seperate kind of object from data .... IMHO C and Unix (and the rise of the RISCs) had a lot to do with their downfall
me: (in passenger seat) "Okay, turn left up here."
486: (behind the wheel) Cursor turns to hourglass for 10+ seconds.
me: Aaaah! Brake! Brake!
486: Hard drive gets really loud, keeps going straight. Hits mailbox and plows through farmer's market. "Beginning dump of physical memory."
me: (bleeding, picking glass out of skin) "Your brother Pentium wouldn't have crashed like this."
486: (tear) "You know I can't multitask!"
worst sig ever. . .
I think "turbo on" actually ran the processor at the rated speed where if it was turned off it underclocked it. I forget where I read this, assuming I remember properly, but I think that's why they removed it eventually because no one ever wanted to underclock their machine. It was probably introduced either to provide more stability or when games wouldn't sync properly and the framerate was too fast.
...and I'll finally be able to have consensual sex with that hot 486 I met at the local Radio Shack. Watch for the barrage of tech pr0n featuring 486's when they finally turn 18 in a few years.
Just curious.....is there a port of the linux kernel to the i860 architecture?
Or does NetBSD or something like it support it?
AMD produced a cheaper, better product then IBM. I skipped the 486 and had a 386dx40 AMD chip that rocked all my buddies sx25's. Sheesh.. 386 running GeoWorks for the wife (cause it could print MUCH better then the alternatives).
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The 486 has been legal in Chile for three years
The intel 860 was the first platform Windows NT was targeted at, back when NT development was first starting.
It does not matter if you are under 18 or within 3 years of age, although it is only a misdemeanor (meaning up to one year in county jail) if you are within three years. Read the penal code
With great power comes great fan noise.
Didn't the PC Jr have a 186?
I could be wrong, but I seem to recall this to be the case.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
My 10 year old laser printer is sitting right here, chugging along fine on an i860. I remember when I got it that it was the fastest processor I owned. And had more memory than my desktop.
...you young kids think...
run a distributed computing client. Simple, problem solved. No more waste. And as a small side benifit it can help you justify a new multi-GHz machine...for the science
Nobody gave a fuck about the RIAA nazis, my AT keyboard didn't have a "Windows" key, and 4 meg of ram made me feel like an old pimp in new shoes.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
*Sigh* I still use a 486... Packard Bell, although it's been heavily upgraded (500MB HD, 133MHz AMD "5x86", 64MB of FPM RAM). Runs Windows 95 great, Space Cadet Pinball can be laggy sometimes though. When I want to type a report for the boss, the IBM Pro Printer Dot Matrix just flies!!
I need some help upgrading, what is the most powerful ISA graphics card ever released?
... and in the DRM, bind them.
It was just a couple of years ago that my dorm-mates and I were entertaining ourselves with Dr. SBAITSO on my old Pentium Pro machine (running Win 98 at the time). I still have all that old Sound Blaster software. As old as it is, that SBAITSO thing works pretty well. It got kind of freaky when it started winning arguments, though.
that my post was moderative informative.
I remember working at a Pace Membership Warehouse (eventually bought out by Walmart/Sam's Club) as a forklift driver and having to constantly go over to the Electronics Dept. to help with computer sales customer service because it was said "You know about computers and stuff, answer their questions".
....SL, SX, DX, DX2, DX4 , we had computers based on each cpu displayed, and I would inevitably be led into "tech debates" with uninformed customers.
I tried several times to explain the processor differences to people buying computers; 486
I once had a guy argue with me that a DX2 meant that there were two processors. I tried, courteously, to explan that was not the case, and eventually decided to walk away and let the sales worker handle the man.
The sales guy assured the customer that he was correct, that the DX2 did designate a dual processor mobo.
Ironic twist: The man returned with the computer a couple of months later and claimed the sales guy lied to him, that the computer in fact, did only have ONE cpu. I didn't gloat, but I thought what a moron. I mentioned to the returns staff the context of the sale and the customer's request to return the computer was rejected.
No - it was a clock 2.5-timed 33MHz CPU. The 166 was a clock 2.5-timed 66MHz CPU. The 83 Overdrive ran on a bus at half the speed and half the width, meaning it was REALLY crippled.
You must've been using the RC1 version that never made it into the final DOS because all MY memmaker managed to do was ruin my hand-tuned config and bring me down from 604kb of conventional memory to about 580kb!
It was crippled but it still ran faster than the 486 it replaced plus it had Pentium features like the performance counters to play with. It had the F00F bug too but hey so did more expensive systems.