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

[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.