Read more.The internet is awash with screenshots as evidence, and there’s a product shot too.
Read more.The internet is awash with screenshots as evidence, and there’s a product shot too.
Shiny!
*sigh*, a celebration of a dog of a part thrown together in a hurry because the i432 was such a disaster and more by luck than judgement it got used by IBM in a machine because IBM thought it wouldn't really sell so it didn't matter.
All these years on and the thought of using segmented addressing to slice up the paltry 1MB address space still makes me slightly nauseous. How can people feel nostalgia for this, it isn't a 68000 or something.
To give it the classic 80's PC feel they should have designed it so you can only get to 640MB of ram for running programs and the rest can only be used as a ramdisk by running a program called "ramdrive.sys", but only after running "emm.sys". Allow a bonus 64MB to people who learn to run "himem.sys". After all, allowing three magnitudes of improvement for the intervening years, 640MB should be enough for anyone
Right place right time though...
And a testament to the fact that quite often the best product doesn't win
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
... and sometimes something that starts off as an ugly ducking grows up to be an ugly duck.
Edit: Given how Intel are re-inventing history here I'm surprised they aren't going the whole hog, selling people an i3 as the "8086" and then later release an "8087" that rather than being the badly designed FPU that it actually was in history could be an unlocked i7 (more like the old 487sx because Intel have been trying to play us for chumps for decades now).
Last edited by DanceswithUnix; 16-04-2018 at 04:01 PM.
Maybe sometimes, but Intel were custodians of the worst processor architecture for decades. In the 90's at one point it was possible to emulate x86 code on a DEC Alpha at something like two or three times the performance of a genuine x86 as Intel were that far behind. No innovation to see here, Intel were holding us back.
But I assume this particular processor is basically a factory overclock vapourware part designed to top the benchmark parts even though you can't really buy it.
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My broadband speed - 750 Meganibbles/minute
I came along via 6502, 68000, 68020 and then 68040 before hitting normal pc land. And was always thoroughly underwhelmed by cpu performance
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
Ahh, the architectural feature that in an 8008 allows the processor to take an interrupt one machine cycle (about two microseconds back then) faster, and now doing our heads in for no reason.
I think I've learnt to mentally block that one out. Sad that the popularity of the PC has forced the likes of Power and ARM to become bi-endian so it taints them.
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