PC Magazine 3/31/92, Trends reports this interesting article...

        Intel fills vacancy: New chips boost 486 speed by 70%
        ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
Begin of quote..

Intel is finally ready to turn off the neon "vacancy" sign it has been
touting in its ads for486SX PC systems. Months after the ad campaign
began, Intel is about to introduce upgrade processors that will double
the clock speed of its 486SX and 486DX CPUs. The new chips promise to
boost system performance by roughly 70 percent.

Although the technology is called clock doubling, it doesn't actually
double overall system speed; it doubles the speed of, internal proces-
sing. A true 50-MHz chip will run faster than a clock-doubled 25-Mhz
chip, but the accelerated chips will affect performance dramatically,
Intel claims. The 486 chip, with its 8K of on-board cache, processes
about 95 percent of the work in DOS applications and 90 percent in
Windows apps internally, according to Intel. Initially, the maximum
clock-doubling speed will be 66 Mhz for the 33-Mhz 486DX, but a 100-
MHz clock-doubler is planned for the 50-MHz 486DX.

Intel will sell the chips to end users and system vendors. Clock-doub-
led upgrade processors for 16-, 20-, and 25-MHz 486SX machines are
expected to show up in retail stores as early as March. Priced around
$500, they will fit into the performance enhancement (or upgrade)
socket. Most 486SX systems have the socket on-board, which means that
installing an upgrade processor on a 486SX-based PC should be as easy
as installing a math coprocessor. For 486DX-based systems, which lack
a coprocessor slot (math coprocessor functions are built into the
chip), the upgrade path is more difficult. Intel is still working on a
solution.

Although there have been no announcements, systems based on the forth-
coming chips should arrive soon, starting with 25/50-MHz 486SX-based
PCs. ALR, AST, and Compaq say one benefit of the clock-doubled chips
is that they work with existing system-board designs. Because the
25/50-MHz chip costs less than Intel's true 50-MHz CPU, it's a good
candidate for inexpensive--but powerful--486 desktop systems.

                Intel lowers prices, increases speeds
                ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
When the 486 chip was still a rumor, the running joke was that it
would be impressive, but, "Hey, how 'bout that 686?"

Intel has never minded speculation about the race it runs with itself,
because for years, this kind of talk helped keep Intel dominant in the
PC industry. Today, however, some of that talk has been replaced by
speculation about AMD's next speed record, often without a response
from Intel.

Although Intel has begun to talk publicly about the wonders of its
next generation P5 (probably the 586), which will be capable of deli-
vering 100 mips (million instructions per second), the company is ta-
king it easy with the "faster is better and newer is best" talk These
days, it's more likely for a new product from Intel to be slower than
its predecessors and to deliver fewer features.

BACKWARD STEP

While it's certainly true that today Intel is focusing on speed with
its clock-doubling technology, just yesterday Intel was getting a lot
of press for stepping backward--with the 486SX. Intel took it on the
chin by announcing that it had disabled the 486's floating-point unit
to create the 486SX. The chip was soon called "the brain-dead 486" by
many. It was an unfair charge, since Intel also dropped the price of
the chip. But it's easy to see why many people were unhappy: Progress
in silicon always brings more features and higher speeds. Prices are
supposed to drop after the technology's been improved, not before. The
kind of packaging we all accept in the auto showroom and at the super-
market just isn't done in the high-tech world.

Intel, however, is sticking to its guns. Most of its new processor
models will be a result of fine-tuning the current 386 and 486 lines
with modest improvements. In the next year, it expects to create 31
new models that provide choices in speed, power management, cache, and
floating-point units. Intel is talking about bringing the power mana-
gement features in the SL to the 486 design.

One of the products in development is a cheaper version of the 386SL,
the chip that features built-in power management interrupts. The new
part will be the exact same chip that's in today's new 20-MHz 386SL
laptops except that it won't have a working cache controller. As a
result, Intel will lower the price by 25 percent. And while there are
both 20- and 25-MHz versions of the 386SL, the new part will be
available only at 20 MHz.

The new product was created because of demand from laptop makers who
were planning to waste the cache controller anyway; they were reluct-
ant to devote valuable system-board space to the extra RAM that the
cache requires.

Intel risks more criticism with this new product because the cacheless
386SL contains the logic for the cache. Like the floating-point unit
in the 486SX, the 386SL's cache is disabled. The real motivation is
that perfecting a new chip design and putting it into production is so
expensive that it's cheaper to deliver goods with nonworking parts
than to create a new design.

Many people who buy a cacheless 386SL laptop probably won't care what
is on the chip as long as it runs their software and they get a good
price on the model. And those who know the difference will have more
choices of performance versus cost.

End of quote..

              Frank Vlamings on Sun 03-29-1992 at 07:28
