← Back to context

Comment by initramfs

1 day ago

Since they are out of patent, curious if anyone would be willing to manufacture it again.

If there wasn't enough demand ~20 years ago for Intel to continue manufacturing the part, it's far less likely that there's enough demand now to justify designing, manufacturing, and qualifying a new part to replace it.

  • Wafer.space slots can support around 4-500,000 transistors in 1x1 titles, usually reserved for 1000 dies. The 386 (non SLC version) had 275,000. In theory this could be manufactured at 180nm/130nm https://wafer.space/

    • But then you would have to redo the whole layout and design of the chip right? Surely you can’t just scale the mask and manufacture the same chip at different scales and everything still works?

      1 reply →