The real purpose of the 386sx was to kill off the 286s, which Intel had been
forced into second source agreements by IBM with. What happened is AMD
(and Cyrix, I think) began to produce faster 286s than Intels for the clone
market. When intel introduce the 386, the machines it was in were vastly
expensive due to the 32 bit bus and only a few motherboard manufacturers. The
SX was designed to fit on a 286 motherboard with essentially only a socket
change and some bios tweaks. The sx *also* allowed windows 3.0 users to run
in protected mode and multitask (sort of) and was the minimum platform to
do that, since the 286's protected memory system had a severe bug.
> >
> > >
> > >>The 386sx is a lower pin count 386 that uses a 16 bit bus insted of the
> > >>32bit again for lower cost and lower power. Bus bandwith was not half
> > >>as it is faster than that.
> > >
> > >Yeah, but it's still a 'downgrade'. But the 386SX was a fairly good
> > >success, and I take back anything bad I said about it. But once again, the
> > >386SX didn't give the 386 all it's glory.
> > >
> >
> > What's better? The 386sx or 386dx. From looking at the suffixes, it
> > appears that it would be the sx, but then, wouldn't that make a
> > double-downgrade, and screw everyone? I'm just saying this, because I have
> > (had - it's now parts) Gateway 386DX/25, and Compaq 386SX/20 (SLT386s/20).
> > The Compaq could run more things quicker than the Gateway. Or is my case
> > just a freak of nature or because of that majic stuff called Cache?
>
> A 386/SX with Cache could beat a no-cache 386DX... but the DX had
> the larger memory address range and a better bandwidth to memory
> 32 bit rather than 16 bit.
>
> My gateway 386 DX25 (now being scrapped to fit in a 486 or Pentium
> motherboard would probably work pretty well compared with the 386SX25
>
> You can pick up a lot of speed with a good cache.
>
> Bill
>
--
Jim Strickland
jim_at_DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com
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Vote Meadocrat! Bill and Opus in 2000 - Who ELSE is there?
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Received on Sun Dec 27 1998 - 21:21:00 GMT