Comment by bombcar
1 day ago
I remember arguments (and benchmarks) around all the variations of the 486 since the bus speed/clock speed was uncoupled (the /2 is clock doubling). For some applications, a 50Mhz 486 with a 50Mhz bus would beat a DX/2 66Mhz with a 33Mhz bus.
And sometimes the DX/4 100Mhz would be slowest of all those at 25Mhz bus.
Nearly correct. The DX/4 100MHz had a 33MHz bus. The DX/4 75MHz had the 25MHz bus. I remember well because I had both.
Now I remember being annoyed that it wasn't the DX/3 as it should have been!
Especially since when actual clock quadrupled chips eventually came out they had to call themselves ridiculous things like ”5x86” instead of DX/4. (The Am5x86 133 runs at 4x33 MHz)
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I remember being so excited when I figured out how to jumper my DX/4 100 and operate it with clock doubling and a 50 MHz front side bus speed. Same core speed, faster memory and I/O.
My peripherals seemed to take it. My graphics output showed some slight glitches, which I was OK with for the speed.
However, I think it was a bit unstable and would fail a correctness challenge like compiling XFree86 or the Linux kernel, which were like overnight long runs. Must have been some bit flips in there occasionally. I seem to recall that once that reality settled into my brain, I went back to the clock tripler config.
I still remember scribbling on Athlons with a pencil to max them out - we probably spent as much on heatsinks as we saved on CPUs.