Gregory's ServerIntel's cost to produce 386 dies rapidly dropped. Eventually, the package cost more than the die itself. Intel redesigned the 386 so it could fit in a cheaper plastic package. 10/13
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 For more on the 386, see my previous tweets: @kenshirriff thanks for this thread. Brought back fun memories. Oh I also remember when I was able to upgrade the office NetWare server from a 286 to 386 again a real game changer.  @kenshirriff wow! An interesting tour through a bit of cpu history. 😃 @kenshirriff I think this is a 386SX chip. A little sibling chip with, I think, 16 bit external data path. Maximum supported RAM was 4MB and I bought such a PC with 1MB RAM as a 'smart purchase.' The PC ran MS-DOS, then Windows 3.1 It had a 40MB HD which, the seller said, would never fill up. With the Windows upgrade the RAM and HD had to be upgraded. The next PC after that was a PowerPC chipped Macintosh. That was an excellent computer in its day but hobbled by increasingly terrible OSs.  @kenshirriff This is a SX 386, who have an only 16bits address bus and a smaller data bus than the vanilla 386.  @kenshirriff AMD made a PQFP 386DX-40 in a package like this one, and it showed up on a bunch of late-model (circa 1993-1995) cheapie motherboards. @kenshirriff 386SX was 16 bit memory bus, wasn’t it. So needed fewer pins at the cost of memory access times. And the double sigma on some of the packages means “gets 32 MUL eax right” so safe for 32 bit apps…. |
Packaging is underappreciated, but it is essential to making chips small and reliable. In particular, getting power to a chip and then distributing power on the chip is harder than you might think. Nowadays, packaging, power, and removing heat is an even bigger issue. 11/13