Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 12:04:07 -0500 (CDT) From: Robert J Fowler <rjf@cs.rice.edu> To: hardware@freebsd.org Subject: AMD 586 runs FreeBSD just FINE (fwd) Message-ID: <199610111704.MAA20346@una.cs.rice.edu>
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Matthew Gessner announced -- > > Hello, all, > > A little status report for y'all. > > I just bought one of those them there fancy shmancy CPU upgrades. I > had an Intel 486/DX266 and upgraded to a AMD 586/133 from Ganberry via > Micro Warehouse. For $140 I have a machine that runs about 2.5 x > faster! > > And no problems with BSD! Yeah! > > I was a little worried having read reports of problems with Cyrix > chips, but so far, so good! If I notice anything, I'll report it. > > Matt > -- Just to add another data point... I've got a 486 box at home that I also upgraded to an AMD 586/133 from an AMD DX/2 at 80 MHz. Since my motherboard could provide 3.3V and it has a not too ancient BIOS, the packaged upgrades from Gainberry and Evergreen really don't offer any added value over just getting just the 586/133 chip. I paid $60+tax from Electrotex here in Houston. The 586/133 is essentially just a 486 with clock tripling/quadrupling and a bigger writeback cache. My no-name VESA motherboard/BIOS doesn't have documented support for writeback nor clock quadrupling. Despite suggestions from helpful hardware hackers that I dike off the appropriate pin on the CPU package (See the datasheet.) to get it to quadruple, I decided to take a more conservative approach. Therefore I'm running the system in writethrough mode and clock tripled mode over a 40 MHz local bus, i.e. the CPU core is running at 120. I am paying a penalty for using writethrough vs. writeback, but I've been insufficiently motivated to try to uncover an undocumented writeback mode. As expected, performance on CPU intensive stuff is therefore a bit over 50% better (Remember the bigger cache than it was before. See the AMD web page for documentation, including the datasheet. The system has been rock solid for about 3 months running FreeBSD or Windows. -- Rob
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