In 1991 Intel found itself in a relatively uncomfortable position, at least when it comes to the bottom end of the market. The main competitor - AMD has won a series of legal battles and was about to repeat what happened in 286 days -flood the market with cloned 386 chips which were cheaper and [...]
I was wondering what would be the ultimate upgrade for my 386 motherboard. It has a 386 CPU soldered-in, an unpopulated 386 PGA socket and a socket for either 387 FPU or 486 PGA or (might take a Weitek as well - not quite sure) and even might have a soldered-in 486SX PQFP. Plenty of [...]
I've recently acquired an interesting motherboard with Intel 430FX Triton chipset. It has a feature I particularly wanted - sockets for asynchronous SRAM chips as well as a slot for COAST modules. Due to this, it allows for an interesting comparison of these two cache technologies. Test environment: Freetech 485F61 motherboard in different cache configurationsIntel [...]
In this article I upgraded my ECS Si5PI motherboard to whooping 2MB of L2 cache. I was interested to see how much improvement the extra cache brings. I remember reading advice in old Pentium era magazines that further cache upgrades beyond 256kB give only small returns. So let's find out. The testbed is as follows: [...]