24 Jan
2013
24 Jan
'13
1:11 p.m.
On 1/24/2013 12:45 PM, Dan Gahlinger wrote:
Nope,I remember running this software, it was from the
above-board peopleI think it was called above486 and it would re-enable the math
coprocessor.
Above board from Intel was a memory addin product with some mapping
junk
on it to make it difficult for people who were selling addin memory
boards alone to duplicate. Are you speaking of someone with the same
name?
There was huge numbers of people selling boards soon after the 286 came
out and that didn't die down until motherboards and simm memory density
made it more efficient to put all your memory on the motherboard. The
other thing that killed the memory was crappy bus performance of the
addin memory.
However I don't recall an "above board" of any other kind than Intel.
someone could have had Above486 and not conflicted with that product
service mark though.
in previous versions of the above board (386) you
needed the hardware version.
this is history, it wasnt a blown fuse or anything, the cpu's were shipped with
thecopro but disabled, and they found a way to enable it.
I do remember something about how it only worked for certain cpusso thats why I thought
it might have only applied to AMD and not intel.
He may be talking about the AMD
second-sourced 486SX, which may have
had a different method of disabling the FPU. My recollection is that
the 486SX was, in fact, the same die as the 486DX (FPU and all) with
a fuse blown that disabled the FPU. That could have been based on
faulty rumor, but it's certainly in line with modern manufacturing
practice of GPUs and multicore CPUs, where the lower core-count
devices are the same dice with faulty units disabled (or, if the
market for the cheaper chips is strong enough, potentially non-faulty
units, but that's less frequent than the overclocking crowd seems to
think).
- Dave
debacle, there was software thatcould
completely restore functionality.I think it was called above-board,
NOPE.
which had hardware as well as software,but on
many SX type systems it
was just software Actually if I remember correctly it was the 486SX CPUs
made by AMD
We are talking INTEL.