From: mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) Subject: Re: 486SXs as Unix Iron? Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1992 00:07:22 GMT
In <1992Oct29.144954.16902@husc3.harvard.edu> maziere1@scws6.harvard.edu (David Mazieres) writes:
>In article <BwsHJr.LnJ@unix.amherst.edu> twpierce@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce) writes:
>>I'm looking for a machine on which to run Linux in the $1500-$2000
>>range. I was looking at a lot of 486SX boxes, until I ran across Eric
>>Raymond's PC Unix hardware buyer's guide, which includes the following
>>paragraph:
>>
>>> ...The 486SX is even worse, a stupid marketing crock
>>> with no technical justification whatsoever....
>>
>>Now I'll grant you that the 486SX is quite the marketing gimmick....
>Does the 486SX really have no justification? The 486's have such a low
>yield, I always assumed that 486SX were chips originally designed to be
>DX's that passed the CPU tests but failed the co-processor tests. Is this
>impossible? Does intel manufacture the 486SX's completely separately?
Yes, Intel manufactures them completly separately, with a different
die and even a different feature size! The supposed story is that the
difference in price is because of the cost of TESTING the math unit in
the full DX part. Sure, I believe that.
-- "Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world." -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden ============================================================================== Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.