Interesting/cool/wierd/rare CPUs you've had?

JC

Diamond Member
Feb 1, 2000
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Wierdest setup I've had was an XT with an Intel inBoard 386-16 upgrade.

Coolest old CPU I've got is an IBM 'Blue Lightning' 486-80. It was the shiznit back when Intel's fastest was 66MHz :confused:



JC
 

Pilsnerpete

Platinum Member
Apr 4, 2002
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This one goes under weird. It's in a compaq so it's no surprise that it's a 180mhz Cyrix chip that's built into the m/b!
I went to rip the machine apart and distribute the parts to my other ones and I realized this wasn't going anywhere.
So I left it. I thought they quit doing that with 486's! Compaqs...errg! "Aawwww, they'll never need anything faster
than 180!"


-->>Pete
 

damonpip

Senior member
Mar 11, 2003
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They're building some new Durons into the mobo too I think, it sucks, but at least they only cost like $40 for a mobo and 1400 on ebay.
 

Scuzz

Senior member
Apr 25, 2000
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I had the SLC2-66, it was a 486 core with a external 386 FPU on a 16-bit 386 MB. With typical apps it was almost as fast as a DX2-66. It was the precurser to the IBM Blue.
 

Mist

Member
Feb 19, 2003
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I have an Intel i386.

Details are:

A80386DX-25 IV
SX218
L9470634
Intel '85

I'm going to make it into a keyring, I think, unless a collector wants to buy it.

Michael.
 

Bartman39

Elite Member | For Sale/Trade
Jul 4, 2000
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I started on PC`s with a Magnavox "Odessy" :D talk about primitive...? (a long time before Commodore 64`s)
 

Sahakiel

Golden Member
Oct 19, 2001
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Wierdest setup : FPGA array.

Coolest setup : Uh, well, they all sucked. I've always been behind the curve... :p

Once, I pulled out an old P233, stuck that sucker into a SS7 board, and ran it at 100x2.5. From what I remember, it didn't really help much.
 

Bartman39

Elite Member | For Sale/Trade
Jul 4, 2000
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Had a PIII 700e that ran 1100mhz on default voltage... (air cooling)

Also a Celeron 600 @1253mhz on just 1.65 volts... (air cooling)

Celeron 366 @652mhz 2.2 volts w/peltier though... :)


Old Tandy 1000TL ran @4 or 8mhz... :p (hehe... ran Deskmate... if you know what that was...)
 

TerryMathews

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
11,464
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Interesting:
-P2 Overdrives for socket 8. Had a pair on a PR440FX dually. Was fairly fast, considering. Due in large part to each chips 512KB 1:1 cache.
-P2 slot 1 engineering sample. Never had a board that could truly do it justice. Unlocked, maxed out at around 500MHz.
-Thunderbird Slot A 700MHz. Ran just fine at 850.

-First production run Athlon 500 Slot A. After Golden Fingers popped onto the scene, this one was able to hit 700MHz without adjusting the 2:1 cache ratio. A real screamer.

Cool:
-1.2GHz AthlonMPs. Have a pair, factory unlocked, run great at 1533MHz. Wayyyy underrated.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
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My good old, burned up Duron. Good CPU until my idiocy destroyed it.
From day one, hit 1GHz rock stable, only needing to be .05v higher than default.
But...at 1007MHz it would not boot. No odd flakiness or anything. it either would freeze while detecting IDE devices or just after win2k started its booting.
 

KF

Golden Member
Dec 3, 1999
1,371
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Fairchild F8 1 Mhz (Mostek version)
This was an "evaluation kit"; the way you had to make a home computer in the early micro-computer days. It was the only way a private person could get a hold of a CPU. The CPU manufacturers made evaluation kits available at a low price for the purpose of promoting their product. If you bought a kit directly from the manufacturer, it came with all sorts of goodies that made it somewhat useable, but it would cost the amount of a few automobiles. Purchased in a stripped version which only a fly-by-night "entrepreneur"could get from the manufacturer, you could get a kit for maybe the price of a used car. Mine was a basic version of one of these, sold "surplus", minus the brand name, when the entrepreneur went bust. I recall it being called the "JOLT". It had 1 or 2K of memory, which was considered good at the time. Semiconductor memory still had the image of being very high tech. It was displacing "core" memory, based on ferrite cores and wires. The F8 was one of several CPUs from different manufacturers introduced at that time, that were primarily intended as "controllers". Controllers -like Intel's 8080- were supposed to operate sub-components of things like $100,000 check-sorters for banks, simulators used by the armed forces, etc., but the possibilities were endless, which was why every company that could make LSI chips was jumping on the band wagon. (The F8 was used in one of the first commericially available computer game systems, sort of like the Ataris that caught on.) The decendents of these controllers operate such things VCRs, TVs, microwaves, CD players, automobile ignitions, printers, keyboards, video cards, optical mice, and remote controls, not to mention calculators.


Alpha Micro AM100 1MHz?

A DEC PDP11 work-alike, Western Digital chips. Yes, the same WD way, way before they made HDs. It consisted of two S100 circuit boards joined by a ribbon cable. The CPU was actually 4 40pin chips, and I think 3 were the FPU. A few hundred TTL chips were needed to interface the CPU chips to the S100 bus. Another 30 chip circuit board was the floppy disk controller, the heart of which was a WD floppy controller chip.

For those that don't know, Western Digital first hit the big time when it created the first floppy disk controller on a single chip. The existance of that chip made the floppy disk practical to use -cheap enough that is- for private persons. The controller chip was a sensation, and I think it cost about $150, but the price quickly dropped. The first consumer-available floppy disk drives were for 8 inch floppies, cost about $400, held 240K bytes, and were single-sided.


Zilog Z80 4 Mhz (Intel 8080 work alike)
Yes even in Intel's 8080 days, people were trying to steal their business. Fed-up, renegade Intel employees decided to make an 8080 "done the right way" and formed Zilog. The Z80 had some added instructions that made progams faster and easier to write. It was TWICE the speed and less than half the cost of the Intel product. The 8080 actually needed at least one other 40-pin chip to do anything, but the Z80 had it all on one chip. Intel of course sued. But since Intel lost, the instruction sets of CPUs became leagally unpatentable, opening the doorway for companies like Cyrix and AMD to tresspass on Intel territory.

Intel 8088 10MHz - Intel 8085 5MHz on a single S100 circuit board. I bought this thing cheap when the success of the IBM PC wiped out the commercial viability of S100 systems, previously the only wide-spread open standard. You can boot either the 8 bit 8085 (a single chip 8080) or the 16bit 8088.


IBM 486SLC2 50
This was a 2x 25 speed CPU. It came out a little before Intel introduced their first double speed CPU. IBM licensed the use of the 486 die design from Intel, but was only allowed to make specialized versions, not a complete duplicate. It had a 16 bit bus when 32 was normal for a 486, was soldered to the mobo, used no heat sink, but was cool to touch. I believe IBM also had some clock tripled versions, but they were only available in systems (you could not buy the mobo by itself.)