Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mcnc!rti!bcw
From: bcw@rti.UUCP (Bruce Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: 80x86 numbering (was: 80486)
Summary: More orderly than appears
Message-ID: <2618@rti.UUCP>
Date: 9 Dec 88 07:40:30 GMT
References: <15374@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <45900175@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <10254@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC
Lines: 28

> In article <45900175@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
> >Rahul Dhesi writes:
> >>Apocalypse approaches rapidly.  From 8086 we derived 80286, and then
> >>things became more orderly as we went to 80386, 80486, and now 80586.
> >>When we reach 80986, what will happen?  
> >
> >Use hex of course: 80a86, 80b86 ... 80f86. Then go to base 36 - 
> >80g86,...  80z86. 

There is, of course an 80186 (and an 80188) - this was a chip used briefly
before the 80286 came out.  It was never very popular, but it was used by
a few clones (like the Radio Shack Model 2000 I believe).  It was really
just an 8086/8088 which had some of the microcode optimizations used by
the 80286 - which means it runs about the speed of a '286 at a similar
MHz rating, but without protected memory.

The *88 chips ended at that point, I think - I've never heard of an 80288.

What do you do with the architecture after the 80386 - outside of speedups
like more on-chip cache and higher MHz?  The architecture has pretty much
reached its limit ... look at '386 native mode:  a complete revamping of
the instruction set!  Seems to me that after '386 native mode there's no
good place to take the architecture, it's already pretty much maxed out.
So you either make it faster or you go to a new chip design.  Why then is 
there all this hype about a '486?  It'll probably only be a fast '386
(like the 80186 to an 8086).

						Bruce C. Wright