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Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

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Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#131

Post by icedchai »

einr wrote: post #76
actionfromafar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in that. But Commodore could have plunked a cheap 68020 in their machines for backwards compatilibity (like how MSX2 had a SOC MSX1 inside, PS2 had a PS1 SOC, PS3 had a PS2 SOC, and so on) and put another "real" socketed CPU as a co-processor. Or made big-box machines with CPUs on PCI cards, for infinite expansion options. "True" multitasking, perfect for CAD, 3D rendering and non-linear video editing. It w…

This is almost exactly what the plan was, until C= went out of business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset It was going to be HP PA-RISC based and have an AGA Amiga SoC, including a 68k core.

How much of Hombre is myth-and-legend? Given how little progress with made with OCS->ECS->AGA, it seems unlikely they could even have built an Amiga SoC, nevermind designed a new 64-bit chipset.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#132

Post by fulafel »

zozbot234 wrote: post #125
fulafel wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several operating systems on 286 (eg Xenix, Coherent, OS/2) used its MMU for multitasking and memory protection. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80286#Protected_mode

The 286 protected mode did not allow for a 32-bit flat address space and was heavily half-baked in other ways, e.g. no inbuilt way to return the CPU to real mode without a slow and fiddly CPU-reset.

It was architecturally a 16-bit CPU so a flat 32-bit address space would be a non sequitur. If you wanted flat 32-bit addressing, there was a contemporary chip that could do it with virtual memory: Motorola 68010 + the optional external MMU. (Or if you were willing to do some hoops, even a 68000.. see the Sun-1)

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#133

Post by saltcured »

bombcar wrote: post #32
einr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DX/2 66 is a true legend of a chip. It was so good. The final nail in the coffin for the Amiga and for 68k. I love the Amiga, but it just didn’t Doom. Before it, you could claim that a 68040 was kinda-sorta keeping up with the 486 and that the nicer design and better operating systems of other computers made up for the delta in raw performance, but the DX/2 66 running Doom was the final piece of proof that the wo…

I remember arguments (and benchmarks) around all the variations of the 486 since the bus speed/clock speed was uncoupled (the /2 is clock doubling). For some applications, a 50Mhz 486 with a 50Mhz bus would beat a DX/2 66Mhz with a 33Mhz bus. And sometimes the DX/4 100Mhz would be slowest of all those at 25Mhz bus.

I remember being so excited when I figured out how to jumper my DX/4 100 and operate it with clock doubling and a 50 MHz front side bus speed. Same core speed, faster memory and I/O.

My peripherals seemed to take it. My graphics output showed some slight glitches, which I was OK with for the speed.

However, I think it was a bit unstable and would fail a correctness challenge like compiling XFree86 or the Linux kernel, which were like overnight long runs. Must have been some bit flips in there occasionally. I seem to recall that once that reality settled into my brain, I went back to the clock tripler config.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#134

Post by sershe »

Heh, I remember using my first machine, a 486 for a long time after it was obsolete and reading system requirements like, what do you mean pentium recommended and why the hell do you need 16Mb of RAM. It's interesting to reflect that the old games like Settlers, HoMM 2 or Warcraft 2, that are no worse than modern ones gameplay wise, used to run on something that is so vastly underpowered by modern standards the numbers don't even feel like a real spec.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#135

Post by bombcar »

saltcured wrote: post #133
bombcar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember arguments (and benchmarks) around all the variations of the 486 since the bus speed/clock speed was uncoupled (the /2 is clock doubling). For some applications, a 50Mhz 486 with a 50Mhz bus would beat a DX/2 66Mhz with a 33Mhz bus. And sometimes the DX/4 100Mhz would be slowest of all those at 25Mhz bus.

I remember being so excited when I figured out how to jumper my DX/4 100 and operate it with clock doubling and a 50 MHz front side bus speed. Same core speed, faster memory and I/O. My peripherals seemed to take it. My graphics output showed some slight glitches, which I was OK with for the speed. However, I think it was a bit unstable and would fail a correctness challenge like compiling XFree86 or the Linux kernel…

I still remember scribbling on Athlons with a pencil to max them out - we probably spent as much on heatsinks as we saved on CPUs.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#136

Post by insane_dreamer »

compiler-guy wrote: post #123
insane_dreamer wrote: post #120

> But when Word 97 arrived with real-time spelling and grammar checking and Clippy, the 486 couldn’t keep up. You really needed a Pentium or equivalent to do all three at once without noticeable lag as you typed. In other words, faster hardware was needed because the quality and performance of the software dropped. I was doing spell-checking with WordStar on an CP/M Apple II with zero lag -- and WordStar fit on one s…

WordStar originally didn’t have a spell checker. It was an add in product. And even after SpellStar was integrated (a response to the NewStar clone’s built-in spell checker), it was never as-you-type spell checking, which is what we got in Word 97, and what consumed the cycles on a 486. Word 97 also had as-you-type grammar checking, which wordstar never had. Wordstar did have an add in extra cost grammar checker whos…

Fair points. I'd argue that realtime spellcheck doesn't provide a lot of value -- when you're writing you want to focus on the writing and go back and fix the spelling when you do the editing.

I'd argue it was a combination of "now we have more processing power lets see how we can use it up" and "we don't have to make so many hard design and programming decisions thanks to the extra power", with the result being that you "had" to get the new chips in order to run the new software that was replacing the old software

Repeat that a number of cycles and we wound up with Windows Vista ;)

Since we're discussing word processors, I would say that WordPerfect5 for DOS was the best word processor I've used to date (Pages on Mac comes in second). It did almost everything that Word does today in terms of word processing (not page layout but Word is terrible at that anyway, you really need InDesign to do that properly), was fast and easy to work with (keyboard shortcuts for operations is much faster than a mouse/GUI), and didn't require nearly as much processing power.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#137

Post by ngcazz »

einr wrote: post #18
gattr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My classmate kept his Amiga 1200 a bit longer! ...eventually he got a PC with Pentium 60 MHz.

Yeah, there were holdouts of course but the DX/2 really seems like the breaking point. (Also, a Pentium 60 is barely faster than a DX/2 66 at many tasks — it is a Bad Processor — but that’s another conversation ;)

You could play 320x200 Quake acceptably on a P60. On a DX4 too, though barely - my family had both in the mid 90s. I'd be surprised if Quake is playable on a DX2.

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#138

Post by ngcazz »

realreality wrote: post #45

I didn't have access to a 486 until around 1999. I was making do with a hand-me-down 8088 and then a 386SX. Back then, 10 years of technological advancement made a huge difference. Today, you can get by just fine with a 2016-era laptop.

Friend of mine is still rocking a 1st gen retina MacBook Pro (from 2012) for music production!

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#139

Post by actionfromafar »

icedchai wrote: post #131
einr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is almost exactly what the plan was, until C= went out of business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset It was going to be HP PA-RISC based and have an AGA Amiga SoC, including a 68k core.

How much of Hombre is myth-and-legend? Given how little progress with made with OCS->ECS->AGA, it seems unlikely they could even have built an Amiga SoC, nevermind designed a new 64-bit chipset.

Here's some stuff:

https://archive.org/details/Hombre_201808/Hombre_Presentatio...

Re: Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989

#140

Post by amoorthy »

mikestorrent wrote: post #95
wiremine wrote: post #81

My first computer was a 486sx 25Mhz [1] The rig (tower, monitor, etc.) cost around $3,000. We got the SX instead of the DX because it was $500 cheaper. And I wanted a 16bit sound card. (Note that this is in 1992 dollars. Today it would cost over $7,000) My parents didn't have a lot of money, but my great-grand father passed and they used some of the inheritance to buy the computer. I was instantly hooked. In hindsigh…

> In hindsight I see how much of a gift my family gave me. True for many, many of us, I suspect. My family bought a 286 in the early 90s and it cost something like $2000 CAD then, which is nearly $4000 now; but salaries were lower then, this would have been something like 5-6% of my single income family's yearly post-tax earnings for the year, and if you think about it as the % of "disposable" income it was probably…

Ha! Same for me: 286 in 9th grade (1990) for about $2k CAD. 286 was a bad call though as I think it was harder to expand compared with 386. I remember 1MB RAM but really only 640k usable. Had to change some BIOS settings to get to about ~700 kB?
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