30 Nov
2001
30 Nov
'01
5:13 a.m.
I found two large white Intel boxs yesterday.
They're not labeled but I
think they're the old Intel ICE boxs. There's also two pods with them, one
is for a iAPX 186 an the other is for an iAPX 286 (80186 CPU and 80286 CPU
for the ones of you that don't speak Intel).
This brings up an interesting piece of trivia...
Has anyone ever seen one of the prototype iAPX386 chips?
The iAPX386 was what would have been sold as the 80386, but the
prelim documents I've got don't describe the virtual 8086 mode
that was present in the shipped 80386 chips.
The name change happened during the lawsuit with AMD. Under a
technology swap agreement, Intel should have forwarded the info
on the 386 to AMD. But ultimately, AMD had to clean-room engineer
their 386 clone chip. I always thought that Intel changed the
name from the iAPX line to what was actually the part number
(i.e. the iAPX286 had the part number 80286), and also made
slight changes to the feature set, just for the purpose of
being able to say to AMD "well, we would give you the iAPX386,
but we decided not to produce it."
-dq