Comments on: Intel 486DX2 CPU

By: Alberto Martinez

Alberto Martinez — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:33:00 +0000

Awesome article, never had one of these back then, but damn, I wanted to!

By: coz

coz — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 21:27:35 +0000

My first PC was a Dx2 66 bought in 1995.
The price with 4MB Ram, VLB ide and trident 512kb?? video was 1600 USD.
It was a big speed jumbo when moved from 8MB to 16MB RAM but not from 4MB to 8MB.

By: ilpalazzo

ilpalazzo — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 21:32:49 +0000

486SX was in the first PC that I built myself as a teenager. Some time later I wanted to upgrade the CPU to the 486DX4 but it turned out my motherboard only supported 5V cpus. I took the mobo to the shop I bought the new cpu from and the support guy modded the mobo to support dual voltage CPUs for a small fee so I could use my new purchase. Good times.

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 16:07:37 +0000

In reply to neo. Cyrix had its SLC and DLC 486s that plugged into a 386SX and 386DX socket, but later they also had pin-compatible DX2 CPUs with 8K of cache. These were faster than the earlier SLC and DLC chips, which were really more like a 386-486 hybrid. The SLC in particular struggled because of the 16-bit 386SX bus. IBM compensated with its similarly named but unrelated SLC2, by cranking up the cache and using clock doubling. I don't know why the Cyrix SLC and DLC chips only had 1K of cache. If I had to guess, it may have been for cost reasons, or the amount of available space on the die.

By: neo

neo — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 15:34:19 +0000

AMD and Cyrix both made their own versions of the 486DX2 to compete with Intel. The AMD version was close to Intel in performance, within one percent. The Cyrix version was about 10 percent slower.

was Cyrix 486-386 socket pipeline like 486? and why’d only 1k cache ?

how similar to i486 was 386-Cyrix 486slc performance