5 Nov
1998
5 Nov
'98
6:42 a.m.
Doug Yowza wrote:
Which reminds me, does anybody have one of Intel's
ill-fated 80376 chips?
You know, the 386 with no real-mode or paging support.
We almost used some 376 chips in one of our low-end routers at Telebit, but
the pricing of 386SX chips was falling so fast that before we even had the
boards back from fab, the 386SX was cheaper.
IIRC, the 376 *did* have paging; our software depended on it. Intel left
out real mode so that it couldn't be used in a PC, since they originally
intended it to sell cheaper than a 386SX for embedded systems. I doubt
that the internal differences between the 376 and 386 were very large; my
guess is that only a small amount of microcode was changed.
I don't have any 376 chips, though. AFAIK they were only offered in PQFP
packages, so it wouldn't be very convenient to play with them.
Eric