Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!clyde.concordia.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!watserv1!alexew
From: alexew@watserv1.waterloo.edu (Alex E. Wielhouwer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Replacing an 80386 with an 80486
Message-ID: <1304@watserv1.waterloo.edu>
Date: 2 Mar 90 15:09:55 GMT
References: <29108@amdcad.AMD.COM> <1640057@hpspcoi.HP.COM> <9830@sequoia.UUCP> <9673@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: alexew@watserv1.waterloo.edu (Alex E. Wielhouwer)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 20

In article <9673@portia.Stanford.EDU> dhinds@portia.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds) writes:
>  First, it sounds like it would be reasonable to expect a 486
>stuck in a 386 board to run about 2X as fast as the 386 at the same
>clock speed and with the same support hardware, due to improved pipelining
>and the internal cache.  Second, the 486 floating point unit is supposed
>to be like an order of magnitude faster than a 387.  If adapting a 486
-----

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but in a multi-tasking environment, the 
floating point registers and stack need to be handled seperately on a
'386/'387 system during task swaps, or, in some cases the '387 is ignored.
(OS/2?). With a '486 environment, this should be much more efficient, i.e.,
faster.


=============================================================================
 Alex E. Wielhouwer, P.Eng.,                        (519)885-1211 x3422
 Department of Computing Services, University of Waterloo, 
 200 University Avenue W, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.   N2L 3G1
=============================================================================