BTW, what kind of 486 is it? 486DX2 at 66MHz?

It's a 486DX2 80MHz with 256kb cache. I don't remember the processor brand, but I'll open the old bugger one of these days in order to check.

cat /proc/cpuinfo

(in linux of course) should display pretty much everything about it. Including manufacturer etc.

Tried that. Vendor_id is unknown, model name is 486.

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"Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?"

Never heard of an 80 MHz 486, but Cyrix had some unusual ones.
My first 486 was a Cyrix DX-50.
Perhaps they did an 80 as well?

On edit ... I do seem to remember now an AMD DX2-80MHz. It was followed by the DX4-100 & then the DX4-120.

Second edit ... got it! AMD DX2-80, probably the only 80 MHz made. You can buy a "new" one here for 20 bucks.

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This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours.

Never heard of an 80 MHz 486, but Cyrix had some unusual ones.
My first 486 was a Cyrix DX-50.
Perhaps they did an 80 as well?

On edit ... I do seem to remember now an AMD DX2-80MHz. It was followed by the DX4-100 & then the DX4-120.

Second edit ... got it! AMD DX2-80, probably the only 80 MHz made. You can buy a "new" one here for 20 bucks.

Flash! There is another mechanism!

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Never heard of an 80 MHz 486, but Cyrix had some unusual ones.
My first 486 was a Cyrix DX-50.
Perhaps they did an 80 as well?

On edit ... I do seem to remember now an AMD DX2-80MHz. It was followed by the DX4-100 & then the DX4-120.

Second edit ... got it! AMD DX2-80, probably the only 80 MHz made. You can buy a "new" one here for 20 bucks.

Flash! There is another mechanism!

Another system? Open communication channel or steps will be taken.

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This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours.

Never heard of an 80 MHz 486, but Cyrix had some unusual ones.
My first 486 was a Cyrix DX-50.
Perhaps they did an 80 as well?

On edit ... I do seem to remember now an AMD DX2-80MHz. It was followed by the DX4-100 & then the DX4-120.

Second edit ... got it! AMD DX2-80, probably the only 80 MHz made. You can buy a "new" one here for 20 bucks.

Cyrix also made a 486 80MHz.

So the bets are up! What will I find in my 486? A Cyrix? AMD? An underclocked PIII?
Stay tuned for the surprising findings!

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"Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?"

OH the suspense, I can hardly stand it. <yawn>

LOL

I must agree with you here at this point. electricity is very expensive.

Here's an interesting little article from the NY Times about Electricity Vampires, devices that continue to suck blood...er, electricty even when they're off.

I must agree with you here at this point. electricity is very expensive.

Oh please! My 486 runs about like a 60 Watt light bulb. It's no big deal compared to air conditioning or even my two P4s. I'm an engineer who is a real pack rat. I found a useful thing for this machine to do. It's more of an experiment than anything else, but I made it do SOMETHING!

I'm just really thrilled that it can do useful work. Yes, It'll be retired shortly, but the point was that it could still do useful work.

I thought that I would make an announcement that 486's aren't really dead (but almost). They can still do useful work, but not competitively in the BOINC world.

I must agree with you here at this point. electricity is very expensive.

If electricity were expensive, people wouldn't waste it the way they do.

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Grant
Darwin NT

I must agree with you here at this point. electricity is very expensive.

This is a general post and is not directed at anyone specific

Electricity is comparitively very cheap, considering the cost of producing it and the impact on the environment, a vacum cleaner, or kitchen appliance has more effect on power usage than i'd say even a modern computer

Where I live it's 10 pence per KW/h for electricity, so that means that i can heat a room, only using 1KW (about a 3rd of what you'll get out of a mains socket) for a whole hour, and it'll only cost 10p, and a kiloWatt is quite a lot of power

Surely people who don't insulate their homes properly and actually "waste" resources are worse culprits than someone who is doing something useful

I have an old petrol car, and i'm sure it's not as efficient as a more modern one, does that mean i shouldn't drive it any more? personally no, don't forget the cost of replacing something, and as far as computers are concerned, a lot more energy is used to make them, so by saying "you should throw it on the scrap heap" is more wasteful in my view, at least it's doing something useful instead of just sitting in a corner somewhere, I personally have recommissioned many older machines to do very useful things, internal web-servers, dns servers, proxy's, routers, firewalls, and they all work great, and most of them only cost me about £50-£100 for the parts i needed, rather than throwing them out, buying a new one to do the same job a Pentium or a Pentium II could do

looking at CPU usage for some of them i could probably get away with a 386 for some of them, my main external router (for connecting to the net) is always busy doing something, most probably downloading boinc work, yet even when i'm logged on to it and doing something, the CPU usage rarely goes above 10%, and this is on a PII 350MHz

My 286, three 386s and one 486 are useful to me for the DOS programming that I do (for my own pleasure). I don't care how old they are, I love seeing how far we've come first hand!

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I love seeing how far we've come first hand!

just gotta wait for the software world to catch up ;)

and hopefully new "requirements" of software will once again help push the development of hardware, maybe encourage different types of processing, rather than just trying to increase raw speed, trying to make it more efficient for example

I'll bookmark this thread and we'll start it back up in a year or two once you get enough results.

LOL... Maybe Martin can turn it off for one month so that he can compare his electricity bills for a real world cost analysis!

;)

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My 286, three 386s and one 486 are useful to me for the DOS programming that I do (for my own pleasure). I don't care how old they are, I love seeing how far we've come first hand!

Yeah... I do to... I wish I had hung onto my 1st laptop... That IBM convertible... Had only 2 720k floppy drives.... Ah, the memories....

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I wish I had hung onto my 1st laptop... That IBM convertible... Had only 2 720k floppy drives.... Ah, the memories....

what about a commadore 64 with a tape drive ;) lol
at least back then, unlike now with our "modern" machines, you didn't need indistrial cooling, just to keep the thing running!

just gotta wait for the software world to catch up ;)

and hopefully new "requirements" of software will once again help push the development of hardware, maybe encourage different types of processing, rather than just trying to increase raw speed, trying to make it more efficient for example

I couldn't agree more. I think everyone is still waiting for that "killer app" (but preferably not bloatware like what has become of most code).

I think tighter code would help with the efficiency part. Now if only the two major CPU manufacturers would make optimizations to their hardware that will encourage more efficient coding.. that would be nice. AMD has already headed in the right direction. Intel is still playing catch up (even that I still like Intel as a company).


Now, I just need to get one of the last Macintosh computers... not that I'm a Mac fan, but I just want a piece of history before they do "the switch".

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I think tighter code would help with the efficiency part. Now if only the two major CPU manufacturers would make optimizations to their hardware that will encourage more efficient coding.. that would be nice.

Same situation as with HTML and the web, invalid and messy code everywhere, although with HTML you can get away with it, i assume if you write invalid code for an app it'll fail to run somehow (i'm no software programmer)

Now, I just need to get one of the last Macintosh computers... not that I'm a Mac fan, but I just want a piece of history before they do "the switch".

what kind of "switch" is apple doing? are they going with "standard" CPUs now? i always thought their G5 architecture was quite impressive really, very well thought out

what kind of "switch" is apple doing? are they going with "standard" CPUs now? i always thought their G5 architecture was quite impressive really, very well thought out

Yes, Apple is going to Intel CPUs, but keeping the OS the same, and staying with proprietary hardware to at least some degree. The G5's are incredible chips, but the latest and fastest ones come with liquid cooling - they're running way too hot. Plus IBM wasn't delivering on the promised speed increases. Intel snowed, um, I mean, convinced Jobs that their new "ready any day now" Pentiums would be faster than the fastest G5s and would run cooler and would cost less. First Intel Macs will probably be laptops, as that's where the heat factor has prevented Apple from even trying to put a G5 in one, and maybe "low end" desktops like the Mini.

Yes, Apple is going to Intel CPUs

good stuff
I've always wondered thou, why is it that intel chips are so hot, yet amd's are relatively cool, i've heard lots about intel struggling to produce their latest chips due to heat problems, yet amd seems to have no trouble

I've always wondered thou, why is it that intel chips are so hot, yet amd's are relatively cool, i've heard lots about intel struggling to produce their latest chips due to heat problems, yet amd seems to have no trouble

Intels CPUs (the P4s at least) have extremely deep pipelines, which are great for high clock speeds. Of course the higher the clock speed the greater the power consumption (also the extra logic for the out of order execution reordering to take advantage of/not be disadvantaged by the extremely deep piplelines adds to the power consumption as well).
The AMD CPUs have much shorter piplelines & so don't run as fast, and hence use less power. AMD have also been using different manufacturing techniques to help reduce leakage current.

Intels Pentium M CPUs on the other hand give very good performance (for Seti & office applications) & use bugger all power. However their gaming, video & general FPU performance is pretty sad.

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Grant
Darwin NT