🚀 go-pugleaf

About the 80686 chip by Intel....

A summer issue of Spectrum magazine (an IEEE publication) gave the details
about the 686 chip, but I'll summerize a bit the publication here.  The 686
and the 486 were similtaneous projects with the 686 staff being the more
prominent group while the 486 staff given the higher priority.  I'm going on
the assumption that Intel didn't figure on the 686 staff working as fast as
they did.  The chip is a 128 bit chip with either 121 or 124 bits being used.
It is a floating point chip and it has prebuilt 3D vector graphics
capabilities.  It runs at only 33 MHz, but it is a RISC chip, it performs one
instruction per clock cycle (actually it takes a total of three clock cycles
to process and instruction, one to load in the instruction onto a cache, one
to load the instruction from the cache to the processor, and one for the 
processor to execute the instruction, but all three phases are occurring
similtaneously).  I do believe it has a 32K cache on the chip.

The article goes on to tell about how the 686 staff had to design around
production, how they had to design around the testing procedures, how the
existing software to create wafers had to be redesigned to handle a project
of such complexity, and how the 686 staff had to also be one step ahead of
the 486 staff in order to use the proper machines (since the 486 staff had
priority over the equipment).  One example of a limitation was that testing
could only handle 127 bits and that 486 deadlines kept them from designing
more portions of the chip by hand.

Is there a catch to all of this?  Yes, just one, the 686 chip is no longer
compatable with the older model chips, but then again, UNIX runs on anything.

Once more, as a query to more informed readers of the net, I thought I saw
a 686 workstation made by MIPS, but I'm not sure, can someone verify this,
and/or tell me of workstations that you know contain the 686 chip?  The 686
seems be a good workstation for intensive graphics based applications.

-- 

T. Tim Hsu                            UUCP    ...pur-ee!ajz@mentor.cc.purdue.edu
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