discrete transistors

< A 486 is certainly faster in terms of CPU horsepower. But a 486 < has no I/O horsepower whatsoever. Nor does any sort of Pentium. Problem with most all of the high power processors. The VAX series were only ok in that respect and were better if there were external IOPs. < It's certainly *possible* to add intelligent I/O channels to an x86 mach The hottest machine I've played with was a hacked xerox XP12 laser printer controller. It was a 8mhz 8086 and a 8089(IOP). It could beat any 8086 system cold (using s100 and multibus systems as standard). Later I would see a 8086 multibus system with two 8089s running CPM-86 and it was far faster than the then new AT. The speed of the IO systems and it's peripherals is everything. I know this from building a multiprocessing/multitasking system in the early 1980s using four z80s in a loosely coupled SMP. The array of z80s, 8085s and 8749s around them to do IO was where the real performance could be found. Allison