Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

The amazing thing (as Ken points out right at the end) is the latest chips store 16 gigabits, about a million times larger, in a similar area. So you can think of each of those 1979 transistors as now containing 10^6 2020's transistors! It's mind-boggling. Also a million transistors is approximately an Intel 80386 (actually it's a little bit more).

View on HN

Also a million transistors is approximately an Intel 80386 (actually it's a little bit more).

275k for a 386. 1.2M for a 486.

(I just noticed the Wikipedia article on the 386 is wrong --- it gives both 275k and 855k, with the latter a citation to a set of presentation slides that doesn't even contain the numbers "855". Perhaps that's where the misinformation came from? But I strongly remember the 275k number from early Intel marketing material.)

I looked into this: the 386SL has 855,000 transistors while the other 386 versions have 275,000 transistors. I updated the Wikipedia page, adding a reference to Intel's detailed "Microprocessor Quick Reference Guide", which has transistor counts for most of their chips. (I wish I had found this guide long ago.) https://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm

That page you found is not 100% either - it claims the 8088 has only 64k addressable memory.

Likewise, I'm doubtful that a 386SL needs over 3x the transistors of the non-SL.

Afaik 386SL was in fact not a 386, but a cutdown 486. This might explain the difference in transistor count.

No, if you look at the die, the 386SL is nothing like the 486. The 386SL more-or-less has a 386 inside it, taking up about 1/4 of the chip. See this floorplan diagram: http://www.bitsavers.org/components/intel/80386/240814-005_3...

The 386SL adds a cache controller, memory controller, AT bus controller, and EMS 4.0 hardware, which is why it has more than three times the transistors. I checked multiple independent sources before posting, and they all said 855,000 transistors for the 386SL. (Sources from 1990s, so they're not parroting Wikipedia.) The cache controller has a (relatively) huge amount of tag RAM, which accounts for a lot of the additional transistors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com