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Comment by yitchelle | Hacker News Reader

It is truly amazing that one person can bring up a 386DX board system. It is true that there are tons of docs available, but still to bring everything together and to get it running is truly amazing. The team size at any of the PC OEMs doing a 386DX design when it was the state of the art would be at least 25 engineers and managers, easily.

Congrats to Alexandru for hitting this out of the park.

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My father used to import clone PC stuff from Taiwan. The guys running these ops were surprisingly small usually. Some of the original ISA graphics cards including the weird CEG (anti aliasing ones) had 3 guys running the entire outfit. The guy writing the software was stuffing boxes in his lunch break and there were no managers. Even the case design companies were one man outfits with all the actionable stuff contracted out. It was remarkable.

I concur. This world is simpler than people think. They share specs on powerpoint files and the firmware is written (/built) by one guy during his breaks (I was going to say exactly this even before I read your comment)

I've always wondered why no one came up with cheaper / mass produced 386/486 SOCs; are there any still-valid patents preventing that or is it too much work when we have powerful & cheap ARM SOCs that can emulate them...

Those do exist, e.g. the Vortex86 SoC[1] comes to mind.

Not sure if the AMD Geode GX/LX series[2] counts, since they IIRC have an external support chip. Some years back I used to work with router boards and industrial PCs that used them. I still have an industrial PC sitting on a shelf with an Eurocard[3] sized SBC and the ISA bus connected to a DIN41612[4] back plane.

The Geode implement a large subset of the i586 ISA tough (the LX also have an AES extension), but some other instructions are missing. I'm also not sure if they still make them any more, but given how many industrial products they're in, I'd bet there are warehouses full of them somewhere, until the last support contract expires.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex86

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Geode#Geode_LX

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocard_(printed_circuit_boar...

[4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:DIN41612-c-federleiste-c...

Not an SOC per-se but PC/104 SBCs were quite common about 20 years ago. I'm sure they're still around now, but ARM is obviously dominant. We used a PC104 SBC running Linux to control a rack of wireless radio amplifiers via CAN network at a job I had in 2001. I rolled our own custom Linux distrib to fit on small compact flash, and worked on the middleware.

(aside, the manager / senior engineer there was quite forward thinking; the whole stack was Python before it was cool, and there was a proto-AJAX front end that only worked in IE because the other browsers didn't support it yet... dashboard that was super nice. Met some really smart people there).

386, 486 embedded chips were widely produced as SOCs but they’re embedded in places you probably wouldn’t look for them. Which is why they’re SOCs. :) 586 and semi 686 compatibles are still available in certain quantities.

Today, a Pi0W could emulate anything up to a low end 486, Pi0-2W/CM3 could do about 486DX-100/low end Pentium.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_IA-32_compati...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8fSdLKx5HlU

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6cXdWMOl8QE&t=241s

Aren't there 486 class cpus in space ? I thought they made radiation hardened designs that were sufficient for their needs.

Yes, 386 and 486. MIPS CPUs are more common.

I also think it would be interesting to see how small, or how fast, you could make a standard 486 by applying modern manufacturing.

Intel did that with the Quark core. (Get the datasheet and compare with the 486 one. Some of the diagrams are identical, and I recall seeing one of the search/replace they did resulted in "QuarkDX" showing up.)

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