<Slower clock speeds. This means that you literally can have a plug in <upgrade. You could also make one with a larger micron process and more <vertical and not worry about heating, but that gets to be bone headed. A <better idea would be to learn from competitors, and start making a more <economical way of producing chips. Your way off. First off intel is the process leader. But when you require everything to be 16bits wide like memory, address latches, byte/word logic and other nifty things to get to 16bit wide the cost goes up for the system. the cost to produce the 8088 and the 8086 was nearly the same save for the 8088 was cheaper due to volumes and not technology. <But I see your point... but remember, before being used on the IBM PC the <8088 had been on the market for 3 years, and probably in OEM's hands a yea <before that. very true. I was running a 8086/8mhz Multibus based system with 512k of ram and a 5mb hard disk and 1mb 8" floppies when the IBM PC was introduced. Needless to say I was appalled at it's terminally poor performance. <>The 386? < <Lower clock speeds... kind of a all-solving solution. Not hardly. <>The 486? < <The 486 was just plain dumb. You didn't really need a 486SX at all. You <could keep on making a 386, but Intel was afraid of AMD catching up to the <(with their 40MHz 386's and all). You could have also made a 386 to go in <a 486 socket. nope. The 486 executed instruction in fewer cycles and had several features that made it faster internally for the same clock speed as a 386. <>The Pentium II? < <The Celeron was actually a pretty good idea, too good. They should have <made the 128K cache at half clock speed like in the PII. A Celeron 333 <will perform better than a PII 300 in the same system, and you can <overclock the Celeron to compete with almost all Intel processors. the celeron is a pentium! it's more integrated with the onboard cache but it's also a fixed configuration so expanding it is harder. <Well, they did have a lot of proffessionals a lot smarter than I am workin <on the problem, and I'm willing to bet they had good ideas, but may have <been shot down somewhere between 'cost' and 'competion'. Also they were trying to get the x86 into the other non PC markets. <I'll say that I don't really like it, and that we could have done much <better. MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, all better than x86, and if they had <competition like the x86 market does, then it'd be a good assumption to <guess that the cost might even be halfed and performance considerably faste The dynamics of the microprocessor market is more complex than you think. If MIPS was so good it would ahve pushed out x86. Alpha is a 64bit cpu targetted at high end systems and the MicroVAX (32bit) was already well established and faster than 386/486. <Well, I'm glad that Merced means the end to this lousy architecture. It <wasn't until this year that we began seriouly getting rid of ISA, which, <aside from going from 8 to 16 bit, hasn't changed all that much since the <days of the XT. Note this is good for the collector side of me, but very <bad for the 'innovative, creative, etc.' side of me. Yep! Now all your boards don't work in the new machine and most of the older PCI ones don't behave either. What will merced run... pentium emulator so there is software for it. Allison