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?'"

Comments

jup

[Anonymous Coward]

15 years old and still routing my packets. :))

Re: jup

[mrjb]

Shame on all of you. In those 15 years, we've seen what was considered state-of-the-art, expensive server hardware degrade to 'suitable for wordprocessing', to a mere packet router. Despite of all pretty eye candy, software isn't what it used to be. "My computer is too slow" is an excuse often heard instead of "my software is badly designed". Of course in those days we had to carve the 0's and 1's of our code in stone, after walking barefeet uphill both ways through blizards. For those who always have had the luxury of lightning fast machines, maybe for a bit you should stand still at what computers at that time were already capable of without 3D accelerator board and a mere 33 megahertz processor.

Re:jup

[blane.bramble]

You might be interested to know that all this was possible before processors surpassed 1GHz. It could be done on a 350MHz P2 without problems. Sure, Photoshop would have taken longer, but then that's the same for any speed increase. When processors reach 10GHz do you think it will mean it wasn't possibly to do with 2GHz now?

Re:jup

[mikael]

These are same reasons they still have the original elevator motors in the Empire State Building. "They simply dont make motors as durable as these anymore. They've been running continuously since 1933."

The control rooms of the Panama Canal amaze me. After 90 years, they still have the same 3D user interface that the architects originally designed.

Re:jup

[torako]

While I definitely agree that your hardware is humble and still lives up to what you need to do with it, one has to consider the a dual PPRO was probably really expensive high-end machine back when it was new....

So unless you bought it used you probably spent a lot of bucks on it back when people would laugh at you and say "Well, what overkill.. What can your PPRO practically do that my old 386 with DOS and Word 5.0 can't?"

And take that thought...

[philntc]

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?

Re:i860

[moreati]

I'd never heard of it either, but google and wikipedia to the rescue:

Intel i860

Basically it was a highend RISC architecture, dependant on smarts in the compiler to achieve good performance, it flopped. Quote:

Paper performance was impressive for a single-chip solution; however, real-world performance was anything but. One problem, perhaps unrecognized at the time, was that runtime code paths are difficult to predict, meaning that it becomes exceedingly difficult to properly order instructions at compile time

.

The parallels with the Itanium are striking.

Designing a compiler which allows the Itanium to perform up to its potential has proved to be a difficult task and a very serious issue. Improvements are steadily being made; still, porting software to Itanium has a reputation for difficulty.

80386 was more significant.

[MtViewGuy]

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.

486 still capable

[panxerox]

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.

Hardware Progression Causing Lazy Programming?

[s7uar7]

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.

33MHz is still useful

[Gilmoure]

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've still got one too

[JayBlalock]

It's a 486DX4/75 laptop w\ full docking station. (back in the days when a docking station was huge and literally converted the laptop into a desktop) I have it up and running as a fully functional backup desktop computer. It's got Windows 95 and can surf the web (Netscape 4) and even play music through Winamp. And it's on the network. So if I've got my main box offline for maintenence or reinstalls or something, I'm over on the 486. Or, I pop the laptop section out if I want to write, so I can get comfy on the couch.

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.