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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 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
mines still going strong, gotta love doom :]
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?
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!
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.
ask and ye shall receive
I'm a lvl25 Artist in the game of Life (tm)
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.
Intel i860
Basically it was a highend RISC architecture, dependant on smarts in the compiler to achieve good performance, it flopped. Quote:
.The parallels with the Itanium are striking.
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.
Pretty RISCy maneuver, eh?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
Intel released the I960 as an embedded chip, expecting to see some military applications. The first versions were the i960KA (without floating point) and i960KB (with floating point). They didn't get all that far in the marketplace. However the i960CA and its followon the i960CF were pretty slick. The i960 had 32 general purpose registers, and a processor-defined function call sequence that always placed a set of 16 on the stack ("caller-owned") and left a set of 16 alone ("args , temp & return values"). The i960CA cached the top 4, 6 or 8 stack frames in on-chip static memory with a 128-bit pathway to the main register set. This gave it amazing function calling and interrupt service performance. We wrote a sample clock-interrupt test that serviced a 100 kHz clock interrupt using only 23% of the CPU. (Remember, this was in 1992...) The product we built (see next paragraph) is still out in the network, switching phone calls.
I remember receiving one of first the 486DX2/66 processors in the city where I live (Columbus Ohio). I was at AT&T/BL at the time, and we were building a product based on a pair of 66MHz 486 and a pair 33 MHz i960CA processors. (Intel sent us a pair of chips for evaluation) We wanted to benchmark them, and I was the only developer whose home system could use the 32-bit capabilities of the 486. The 486DX2/66 was a screamer...
<offtopic>
Being a total geekazoid, I had UNIX (yup, I blew $800 on a "used" SVR3.2 license)! I kept that license current through Novell UNIXware SVR4.2 in 1996, when this new geek-friendly OS called "Linux" had just received BKL-based SMP capability. I tried it, liked it, and kept using it. This "Linux" already had better VM performance (in my opinion) than the traditional UNIX, and semed to me to be on the way to much larger things. I stopped updating my UNIX license, donating it instead to a local high school.
I've been a developer for >30 years and have a clear idea of what I want in a workstation. Linux (and to be honest, including the valuable GNU utilities) provides that set of capabilities better than any other system I've ever used. I don't know about MacOS X, it might be pretty good. But in my experience, Linux has no peer. FYI, this experience includes every Microsoft operating system, every IBM mainframe operating systsem up to VS/ESA, PDP-11 DOS/Batch, RSTS/E, RT-11, VAX/VMS, Data General RDOS, AOS, AOS/VS on the MV4000 and MV8000, classic UNIX on a 68010, UNIX on IBM/Amdahl mainframes, BSD/OS on PCs, SunOS on sparc/2 and Sparc/10, NetBSD and OpenBSD. I also tried out Next and Apollo Domain. Sun and the BSD's came closest to Linux in quality.
Everything else is an also-ran. Finally, at present my day job involves embedded Linux. I've worked with both uClinux (m68k) and real Linux (MPC860 & 826x), (mostly updating and debugging) drivers for both. I have *never* seen a system as robust. Linux itself, the development process that led to its existence, and the ongoing development process that allows it to be such a powerful system, are all major treasures for those willing to recognize them.
</offtopic>
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 ----
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.
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 ;)
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
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.
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". ;)
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
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 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.