27 Oct
2001
27 Oct
'01
11:29 a.m.
Richard Erlacher skrev:
I saw a '386 motherboard with VLB slots on Tuesday,
but didn't bite. It took
me WAY too long to give away all my old '386's, and the only one I kept was
one that uses a '287 coprocessor, just for interest.
287? I didn't think that would be possible. Don't they use different length
arithmetic, just to name one difference?
A propos lower-end PCs, I've got a 286 laying around in the hallway. I was
planning to recycle its case (Save for the bulky PSUs, old PC cases are
generally much nicer than modern ones IMO.
However, I thought I'd have some fun with it for a while, and make a
contraption like Tony's PC, using the CPU socket upgrades I've scrounged.
But if I put a 386 upgrade (I've got two, one Intel AboveBoard and another one
from Nokia) into the 286 socket, how will the clock
frequency be derived? Will
it just take the motherboard frequency and run at
8-10-12-16 MHz, or will it
multiply it? Or would it run asynchronously from the rest of the board (it's
obvious that I have no idea what I'm talking about =) using its own frequency?
BTW, in German, that's Taktfrequenz, IIRC, Erlacher. ;-)
Then how would one solve the memory issue? Most 286 mobos will use DIPs for
RAM, and I'm uncertain about their expansion abilities. I also have some
awfully slow ISA RAM upgrades, but would the new CPU even support that?
It would make a nice novelty item, at least. =)
If you're going to use it as a server, e.g. under
Netware, you don't need a
hot processor. The disk I/O proceeds via DMA at the rate at which the drives
can go, and the network I/O does too. The CPU is idle much of the time,
since it really only manages the transfers and handles directories. With one
or two people, 4 at the most, even a '386SX-16 would be plenty.
Not if you're going to put an NE2000 into it. =)
Here's an interesting page which surveys how different ethernet apaptors will
push different processors:
http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/misc/mca_lanperform/
[snip]
--
En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.
The gates in my computer are AND, OR, and NOT, not Bill.
--Tony Duell