486dx2 System Question

[Hodgkinson]

FYI, I've got a Extended ISA GFX board from those days, plus some ISA serial/parallel port cards and a few other things (386 CPU somewhere) of anyone can make use of them.

Hodgkinson.

[Hodgkinson]

I do believe that one of my friends told me that Pentium processors were actually something like 4 Intel 8080's strapped together...No wonder he hates x86 processors over 68k's...

Hmmm. Does that imply that modern Pentium processors could in fact just be a few thousand 8080's strapped together...lol...? :-D
Nah...But I wouldn't be surprised if great chunks of modern processors are still like 8080's...

Hey, re dual core/quad core processors...I wonder how much processing power the extra software is using to control the two cores? And what improvement does having 2 cores at 1.5Ghz have over 1 at 3Ghz :roll:
Besides, turning a core off when its not in use is nothing new...my Dell 400Mhz laptop just throttles back the processor to save power...

Oh, that reminds me...Why are features on the dies having to be made smaller and smaller? Why not just make larger dies?

Hodgkinson.

EDIT: Theres got to be a limit to how many cores you can actually use...Either you're going to have more cores than applications (Errm...having said that the "Processes" list in XP is rather long...), or the processing power required to split a application over more cores is larger than the benifit of using the multiple cores...

[Hodgkinson]

Ah. I thought cost might have somthing to do with the die size.

Re multiple cores, since I've got a few 68020 PGA's on boards in the garage, I tinkered with the idea of somehow using the two CPUs to double the system speed by staggering the clock pulses. I instantly ditched the idea as many commands need multiple clock pulses to execute/load/output data, and any on-chip memory would create real problems.
It would probably need a full kickstart rewrite, as in the A5000 system.

Shame I've heard so little of the transputer system. Sigh. If only you could just strap pins on processors in parallel and get twice the processing power :-)

Hodgkinson.