p2pnet.net News:- Remember how chuffed you were when you bought a 486?

To all intents and purposes it was a souped-up 386, roaring along at 25Mhz to 33MHz.

Wow. heh.

Well, the 486 is now 15 years old, as ChipGeek points out here, going on:

“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 dump the i860 and focus entirely on the 486, ChipGeek says, adding:

“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.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 12th, 2004 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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