🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov9.200839.27999@exu.ericsson.se> exuhag@exu.ericsson.se writes:
>Derek Schott writes:
>>
>>After watching the market trend, I have the funniest feeling that
>>everything has about hit rock bottom. A lot of people keep saying 
>>that the introduction of the i586 is going to severely cut the
>>prices of both the 386 and 486 machines. Although it might drop
>>the prices at first, I don't see why it is going to cut them so
>>much.
>
>Not to mention that very few people actually need a 586 (aka Pentium).
>How many people--excepting ray-tracing fanatics and people who do
>serious number crunching--have had any speed problems with a 33 MHz
>486?  For the mass-market, the Pentium is a solution waiting for
>a problem (like CD-I).  I can't see people scrambling to buy them,
>unless they are one of the rising number of buzzword addicts.
>
>--
>James Hague   
>exuhag@exu.ericsson.se


I have a prediction about what the i586 will do to the PC market.  You
see, I am an avid upgrader--having gone through ALL iterations of the
80x86, from 8088 to 486-66DX-2.  Yes, there has been an increase in
*speed*... but there is more to what a new CPU does to the industry.

Consider a three-tine fork: Speed, Software, and Interfaces.  When the
8088 was king, the XT bus was popular.  The 80286 didn't "kill" 8088
software (real-mode software was untouched)... but it introduced the 16-bit
bus.

The 80386 began to kill the 8088 software world.  Windows 3.1 is nailing
down the coffin.  It has also, but not quite, killed the XT Bus--and
made "16 bit" cards the defacto standard (if anything, just so that
interrupt lines could be doubled).  Speed-wise, the 486 is king--70
times faster than the 8088.

What hasn't changed?  The ISA bus is still predominant.  But the 486
will not change it.  Why?  Because until recently, nobody really *notices*
that there is a problem with the ISA bus.

But the 486 can access 4 Gigs of memory and supports virtual memory
(like the 386).  But NOW, memory is cheaper--32 megs of RAM in a PC is not
unheard of these days.

So what's the problem?  The ISA bus only addresses 24 bits--or roughly
16 megabytes.  If memory-mapped I/O is needed (such as in a 24 bit
NTSC video digitizer), it can only map the I/O at under 16 megs (this can
also affect some software when virtualizing RAM through a hard disk
controller).  In effect: it reincarnates the infamous 640K barrier at
16 megabytes!

The 586 is a new architecture, and I predict that it will introduce or
at least mandate a 32 bit (or 64 bit) bus.  This will, in essence,
"kill" the 386/486 as it exists now (until motherboards are made for
a wider bus).

All of the previous is my humble opinion.  But I have been beating my
head against the 16 meg barrier for almost two months now.

Change will happen.  By any means necessary.

-> joe <-