[HN Gopher] Pentium on a 386 Motherboard ___________________________________________________________________ Pentium on a 386 Motherboard Author : userbinator Score : 95 points Date : 2021-10-30 05:02 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (dependency-injection.com) (TXT) w3m dump (dependency-injection.com) | accrual wrote: | I tried searching but couldn't find an answer, is PODP == Pentium | Over Drive Processor? The top of the CPU shows PODP5V, so maybe | Pentium Over Drive Processor 5 Volt? | userbinator wrote: | Correct. | Agingcoder wrote: | This is great. | | And I hadn't seen the name weitek in.. Well I can't remember! | bigmattystyles wrote: | Truly living up to the URL! Great stuff | krallja wrote: | With how easy that was, I'm surprised we didn't see more cursed | Pentiums in the 90s. | magicalhippo wrote: | I recall upgrading my 286 to a 468. Correction, it was one of | those Cyrix 486 clones on a 368 motherboard[1]. | | I bought the motherboard, CPU and RAM. Half the cost was the | 8MB of RAM. CPU was the next most expensive item. | | Worked fairly well, but it was speed limited in certain cases | by the 386 motherboard/memory combo. Also not all | applications/games would run since they didn't properly detect | it as a proper 486. | | [1]: | https://ancientelectronics.wordpress.com/tag/486-in-386-moth... | AnotherGoodName wrote: | There was even a "Make it 486" CPU for 286 motherboards so | you might have been correct. All the upgrades were terrible | though really and everyone knew it. Better to save up and get | a real 486 or Pentium. | [deleted] | don-code wrote: | It might not have been economically viable. The pace of | obsolescence at that point in time was so fast that it might | have been cheaper, over the course of two or three years, to | just buy a whole new system than to retrofit a Pentium to a 386 | mainboard. | | Consider what else happened in the 386 through Pentium | transition: | | * The PCI bus became standard; your peripheral cards all needed | to change. | | * SDRAM became standard; the memory bus became significantly | wider / faster, and you bottlenecked on RAM if you used older | mainboards. | | * IDE, while it was already used for hard drives, was now used | for your CD drive too - you probably wanted a CD drive and not | a second floppy drive (different controller) in your machine, | which was harder if you only had a primary IDE bus. | tyingq wrote: | _" The MR BIOS on my board is quite confused and reports the CPU | to be 586SX, which I like"_ | | I think that's correct though. From what I can find, Intel | renamed 586 to 586SX after they released their MMX capable | Pentiums. So "non-MMX Pentium" is supposed to be 586SX. "MMX | Capable Pentium" is 586DX. | monocasa wrote: | Yeah, it's why it's Pentium has the 'pent' in it, being the | '5'86.. IIRC the trademark office told them they couldn't just | trademark a number so they did the next best thing. | _0ffh wrote: | Yep, at the time we were jokingly speculating if the next | generation would be called Hexium. =) | formerly_proven wrote: | I'm still disappointed that AM4 isn't PGA1337 and that they | never released an AMD Furion. | lostgame wrote: | That's fascinating to know! I'd personally had a 386 and 486 | before I finally got a Pentium, and I never understood the | significance of the nomenclature. That's super neat! | SavantIdiot wrote: | I'm utterly baffled that this worked. Ignoring an entire border | of pins? Voltage levels from the chipset? Bios recognition? IO | timing diagrams? | | I kinda don't believe this, but I'm too lazy to look up old | datasheets. | giuseppeciuni wrote: | Great job!!! And even funny to do I suppose! | morsch wrote: | This led me to this gem on Wikipedia: _The i487SX (P23N) was | marketed as a floating-point unit coprocessor for Intel i486SX | machines. It actually contained a full-blown i486DX | implementation. When installed into an i486SX system, the i487 | disabled the main CPU and took over all CPU operations. The i487 | took measures to detect the presence of an i486SX and would not | function without the original CPU in place._ | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87#80487 | SavantIdiot wrote: | There was also 486 in a 386 socket called Sidewinder at Intel, | but it never shipped. It had an ASIC on the back of the | package. There's no record of this anywhere on Google. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-31 23:00 UTC)