IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386? (2014)
os2museum.com
os2museum.com
The Blue Lightning supports 80486 instructions, so it can run modern NetBSD. That'd make for some interesting observations.
There's a powerful lesson in here somewhere.
The world population had doubled by 2020 from 1980, while US population grew only 1.5x. US GDP had grown 10x, world 3x. So the world had shrank at least 1/2, and the US both had to earn more influence and had gained more leverages during these years. It would not be surprising if seemingly overly litigious and possessive culture both in the US and world at large were mere symptoms, than cause.
It's time to, either have a global thermonuclear war for a proud rewind(please no, I could be sitting far enough to die liquefying over weeks when suns appear over), or to boldly go where no one has gone before.
In regards to advancing competition, licensing's role was to be an obstacle that needed overcoming.
There were several fabs that had licenses, and there were lawsuits around whether or not they were transferable.
https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/intel-and-the-x86-archit...
Maybe it was rather because IBM required second sources, so Intel wouldn't have gotten the x86 win without licensing it to other manufacturers.
[1] for a value of easy that was something between "we made all the software and so recompiling on a new processor isn't customer painful" to "the thing is programmed entirely manually anyway so who cares".
+ Or IE, or Netscape.
Interestingly, the 487SX was a complete 486DX that disabled the original 486SX.
https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/optics/olympusmicd/galleries/ch...
EDIT: IBM's LC chips were targeted at laptops initially but then found their way into embedded systems. Cyrex (used in the BL line) was often slightly ahead in performance and performance/price, but compatibility wasn't always there.
More interesting yet it would be to know the Power/speed ratio compared to modern chips.
Wikipedia says the 386SLC from the article drew 2.5W at 25Mhz. A Ryzen mobile CPU draws something like 15W. My gut says the Ryzen is a lot more than 6x faster.
The Ryzen 7040 has 25 billion transistors manufactured on a 4nm process.
That’s 30,000x more transistors on a much more power efficient process. There’s no real-world task where the Ryzen won’t perform many orders of magnitude better. Anything involving floating point must be millions of times faster because the 386SLC didn’t have an FPU at all whereas the Ryzen has wide SIMD and an integrated GPU.
MHz has never been any part of the story.
Performance wasn't great and compatibility was an issue more than you'd expect.
I think they were closeouts IBM decided not to mass produce.