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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?'"
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.
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 ;)
The original Beowulf cluster was 486-based.
It had 16 machines.
> "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 one is actually true.
Officially, once turned on, you could not leave the protected mode on the 286. IIRC there is an undocumented 'loadall' instruction which allows you to do this though. But I doubt Windows was using that one. Instead the BIOS provides functionally to exit protected mode by doing a silent warm reboot (It puts some magic value into the CMOS RAM, causes the processor to reboot and the bootup code checks for the magic value and returns to the OS).
Tobias
It doesn't look like you ever actually used one much. Funnily enough (given the parent article), I had the pleasure of using the Happauge 4860 motherboard which took both a 486 and 860. It was great - I could run UNIX on the 486, and then compile and build 860 programs, running programs on both processors simultaneously. It was good for me, because I could use the 860 simply as a coprocessor, but a very powerful one (it left even a 4167, let alone the 486's onchip FPU in its dust..), never having to worry about actually dealing with an i860 OS (of which there were some ,but I never had one...)
:) And on that note, in typical Slashdot style, the article has a simple factual error: the 486 and 860 were _not_ released simultaneously; the 860 came first.
For all its quirks, I wouldn't agree that the 80860 was a sucky processor. It was fast, but weird. Faster than anything else out there, mind. There were no Alphas back then. It left the 486 in its dust, at least until the very latest 486s (100MHz DX4s, etc)
It was also the first non-RAM million-transistor chip from anyone, ever.