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Concept
I486
Summary
The Intel 486, officially named i486 and also known as 80486, is a microprocessor. It is a higher-performance follow-up to the Intel 386. The i486 was introduced in 1989. It represents the fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs following the 8086 of 1978, the Intel 80286 of 1982, and 1985's i386.
It was the first tightly-pipelined x86 design as well as the first x86 chip to include more than one million transistors. It offered a large on-chip cache and an integrated floating-point unit.
When it was announced, the initial performance was originally published between 15 and 20 VAX MIPS, between 37,000 and 49,000 dhrystones per second, and between 6.1 and 8.2 double-precision megawhetstones per second for both 25 and 33 MHz version. A typical 50 MHz i486 executes around 40 million instructions per second (MIPS), reaching 50 MIPS peak performance. It is approximately twice as fast as the i386 or i286 per clock cycle. The i486's improved performance is thanks to its five-stage pipeline with all stages bound to a single cycle. The enhanced FPU unit on the chip was significantly faster than the i387 FPU per cycle. The intel 80387 FPU ("i387") was a separate, optional math coprocessor that was installed in a motherboard socket alongside the i386.
The i486 was succeeded by the original Pentium.
The concept of this microprocessor generation was discussed with Pat Gelsinger and John Crawford shortly after the release of 386 processor in 1985. The team started the computer simulation in early 1987. They have finalized the logic and microcode function throughout 1988. The team finalized the database in February 1989 until they taped out on March 1st. They received the first silicon from the fabrication on March 20th.
The i486 was announced at Spring Comdex in April 10, 1989. At the announcement, Intel stated that samples would be available in the third quarter and production quantities would ship in the fourth quarter. The first i486-based PCs were announced in late 1989.
Official source
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