🚀 go-pugleaf

> 486 rumors

This is a slippery subject, but I'll venture a few items that I'm fairly
confident in.

o  On-chip caches, 4K or so
o  Versions with and without on-chip floating-point
o  Average clocks per instruction close to 2, for a several-times speedup
   over the 386
o  Radically different bus interface
o  33 MHz initial clock rate
o  Announcement around April '89

We also published a detailed article speculating that it would have
downloadable microcode in some form.  I've heard this from enough places
that I believe there is some kernel of truth to it, but I now doubt the
microcode is "soft" on a wide scale.

Another very interesting aspect of the 486 is the chip that will be
promoted as a math coprocessor, code-named the N10.  This is in fact
a stand-alone RISC processor, with astounding floating-point performance:
I've been told 50 MFLOPS double-precision.  It will be coupled in some
way with the 486, with the 486 offloading tasks to it.  Whether or not
it will be marketed separately is up in the air.

As for faster MS-DOS machines, I'll admit to spending many hours in
MS-DOS (mostly Ventura Publisher), and I'd be delighted to have an
MS-DOS machine that was 4X faster than my 386 box.

Michael Slater, Microprocessor Report, 550 California Ave, Suite 320,
Palo Alto, CA 94306; 415/494-2677    mslater@cup.portal.com