13 Nov
2000
13 Nov
'00
11:55 a.m.
Dwight Elvey <elvey(a)hal.com> wrote:
Which 80186? These came in a lot of flavors. Every
letter
following meant a change in pinouts or some feature inside.
Allison wrote:
Ah no, the 80186 and the 80188 were the only versions
though the
PACKAGE was different with plastic and ceramic plus PLCC and
other varients. The only other version was the CMOS varients
same part in cmos. That it up held by my Intel 1987 embedded
controller Handbook.
You're both right. Originally there was only one major version of each
of the 80186 and 80188, with only minor variants for packaging (and
maybe speed grades?).
But in more recent years, Intel has added a plethora of variants
identified by a two letter suffix, where there are non-trivial funtional
differences. I think this trend in Intel part numbering started
some years ago with the 8051FA. They stopped assigning a different
number to functional variants, and added alpha suffixes instead.
This has since been done on the i386, i486, i860, i960, 8096, 80196,
and other parts.