Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!quiche!calvin!rossp
From: rossp@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca (Ross PORTER)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: ALR PowerFlex 486 upgrade (was Re: Brain-dead 286 - summary)
Message-ID: <2481@calvin.cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 14 Mar 90 16:27:22 GMT
References: <1827@crash.cts.com>
Reply-To: rossp@calvin.cs.mcgill.ca (Ross PORTER)
Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Lines: 11

In article <1827@crash.cts.com> jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau) writes:
>>A question for anyone with an ALR PowerFlex with the 486 board.
>>I'm personally a little bit leery of a 16-bit
>>machine being given a brain transplant with a 32-bit processor.
>>Obviously, the 486 board will contain main memory (how much?).

Byte magazine reports that the 486 upgrade is not a real kludger.
Certainly, there is a 16-bit-bus-bottleneck, but this is greatly eased
by the on-chip cache.  Note that there is no main memory on the 486
board.  Check out the Byte article (11-89, pp. 110-113), note the 
floating-point benchmarks especially.