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From: keithl@loop.uucp (Keith Lofstrom;;;628-3645)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: i486 / 100 Mhz
Message-ID: <1991Feb26.214901.10374@loop.uucp>
Date: 26 Feb 91 21:49:01 GMT
References: <1031@tuura.UUCP>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Launch Loop, Portland OR
Lines: 31

In article <1031@tuura.UUCP> mattij@tuura.UUCP (Matti Joutkoski) writes:
>Intel just showed up 100 MHz version about 80486 in some conference
>at California.
>
>Does anyone have a little bit more information about that processor,
>when it might be finally 'released' aso...

The conference was the International Solid State Circuits Conference
(ISSCC);  I saw the tail end of the paper.  The part barely made it
to 100MHz under ideal conditions.  In practice, that would translate
to 60MHz or so in a live system, with extensive cherry picking (sorting
parts for best performance) and careful control of temperature and
power supply.  Those parts would have to be mounted in a multi-chip
module with the second stage cache memory to go at that speed.  I 
imagine such a unit won't appear for at least a year, and be damnably
expensive.

Right after the paper, the author went off to a press conference,
rather than to the author interviews.  The session chairman said 
Intel may not get a chance to give any papers next year with bad
behavior like that.

There is an interesting three-way battle going on right now, with
Microsoft forming alliances with MIPS, and Sun licensing the Sparc
to other companies.  Intel fights back with a fast CISC.  Whoever
wins, it oughta mean some fast, cheap computing iron in the next
few years.
-- 
Keith Lofstrom  keithl@loop.uucp ...!sun!nosun!loop!keithl (503)628-3645
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Power ICs