Did AMD ever make ?

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narsbars

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Anyone know for a fact if AMD ever made a 486 DX4 166 ? It was a rumor at the time but I don't know if they ever made one. Would buy one in a minute if I ever found one.
 
I was thinking that the 486DX4-120 was the fastest DX4 they offered. They had a 486DX5-133, but I've never heard of an actual 486DX4-166 being released.

Ax
 
I have seen pics where AMD and Intel printed on the same chip :) (no photoshop) .....
 
Pieter3dnow said:
I have seen pics where AMD and Intel printed on the same chip :) (no photoshop) .....
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Yeah, that was back when AMD was a licensed cloner of Intel chips, on the 80286 and before. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/KL_AMD_80286_CLCC_Bottom.jpg

Harris, Fujitsu, TI and other second sources would have the same notices. AMD's AM386 and later chips wouldn't have an Intel copyright notice on it because they were either AMD's designs, or in the case of the AM386, a mixture of Intel and AMD design.
 
I had an AMD DX4-100 that did 150 all day on my VLB motherboard. That bumped me up from 8FPS to 12FPS in Quake. The Pentium 100 I upgraded to with a Voodoo1 PCI card of course destroyed it (relatively).
 
I had a 133 MHz AMD 5x86 that I ran without a heatsink. It was rated for 55 Celcius and was marked "USE HEATSINK AND FAN".
 
Yep, echoing others here, AMD produced a "5x86-133". Fastest clocked 486 anyone ever made and faster than Intel's DX4-100.

I have one. Has a heatsink glued on (no fan) and runs pretty hot (at stock speed on a 33MHz MB). It was designed to be competition to Intel's "Pentium Overdrive" upgrade chips for 486s. I remember benchmarks at the time showing the 133 to be equal or faster in most integer benchmarks, but slower for floating point operations (a strength of the Pentium). It was also significantly less expensive than the Overdrive and far more compatible with various 486 motherboards. As well as having the ability to be overclocked; commonly to 160MHz. You'll need a fan as well as a heatsink, though.

Just checking on Wikipedia, apparently AMD did in fact make a faster default 150MHz "X5-150 ADW" model. Apparently for OEMs only. And as you might expect at that clock speed, it only came with a few uncommon 50MHz clock speed 486 motherboards. 50MHz 486 boards were uncommon due to the fact that the VL bus (the most common high speed bus on 486 boards) really didn't like working at speeds over 33MHz.
 
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pissboy said:
I had an AMD DX4-100 that did 150 all day on my VLB motherboard. That bumped me up from 8FPS to 12FPS in Quake. The Pentium 100 I upgraded to with a Voodoo1 PCI card of course destroyed it (relatively).
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Yah, I had the same experience here playing Quake/TF1 :). Quake's graphics engine made large use of floating point calculations. The 486's floating point unit ("FPU") was nowhere near the speed of a Pentium's, so playing Quake wasn't ideal with them. Possible, but not ideal. Still a great deal for most all other computing tasks at the time, though.
 
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Fritingo said:
Yep, echoing others here, AMD produced a "5x86-133". Fastest clocked 486 anyone ever made and faster than Intel's DX4-100.
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Yeah, it was just the fastest model AMD had at the time and it could only be directly compared to the Socket 3/4 Pentium Overdrive since that was the only 486 socket compatible chip Intel was still selling in consumer spaces.

The Pentium Overdrive was around 10% slower per clock than the same speed Pentium models running in a native socket. AMD gave the AM5x86-133 a performance rating equal to a Pentium 75MHz, really no match for the Pentium 90 and Pentium 100 which came out 1.5 years earlier. The Pentium Overdrive for socket 3/4 ran at 120 and 133MHz. So AMD just pared down the price on the 5x86 to undercut the slowest Pentium being sold (Pentium 75). Familiar story, bro.
 
pxc said:
The Pentium Overdrive was around 10% slower per clock than the same speed Pentium models running in a native socket. AMD gave the AM5x86-133 a performance rating equal to a Pentium 75MHz, really no match for the Pentium 90 and Pentium 100 which came out 1.5 years earlier.
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True. But the Pentium Overdrives for 486 sockets (1, 2 & 3) only came out in 63 MHz (for 25 MHz bus) & 83 MHz (for 33 MHz bus) speeds. The Am5x86-133 was more than comparable to the Overdrive 83 MHz, at least in integer performance. It wasn't a plain old 486 either; besides the clock speed, it had twice the L1 cache of a typical 486 (16 kb vs 8 kb) in faster "write-back" configuration. The end result is that it (AFAIcan remember) outperformed an Overdrive 83 MHz, at least for integer computing (which made up the vast majority of a typical computing workload). For floating point tasks of that era (i.e. Quake 1), it fell behind due to the Pentium's superior FPU. Still a far better value than the Overdrive for most people.

Any Overdrive faster than 83 MHz was designed for Pentium replacements (socket 4 or more) only, not 486 ones.
 
As a follow-up, I see what you are saying regarding AMD using the Am5x86 as an alternative to full Pentium systems. The AMD K5 (their first Pentium-class chip) was late arriving and the 5x86 was the fastest they had until 1996. It wasn't until the later K6 in 1997 that they really put the heat on the Pentium (outperformed it at a lower price, etc.).

The 5x86 wasn't really a genuine Pentium alternative at the time; the best if could do was approximate "real Pentium 75" speed...in integer calculations. But by 1995, they already had out Pentium 120 & 133s, which the 5x86 couldn't touch. Not to mention the PCI bus replacing VL (some of the the last 486 systems did include PCI) and so on.

Still, as an upgrade for a (or assembling a new) true 486 system, the Am5x86 was the pinnacle of 486 technology and superior to the lame Pentium Overdrives for 486 systems.
 
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