486 computers and Unix

[Ti Kan]

In article <1991Jan11.024255.14681 at NCoast.ORG> allbery at ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) writes:
>As quoted from <1049 at gistdev.gist.com> by flint at gistdev.gist.com (Flint Pellett):
>Telotech upgraded its Altos 1000 to a 486 processor about a year ago.  No
>fancy paper to sign, nothing.  But Altos did note that they did not have
>problems caused by the 486 bugs on the 1000.  They may have delayed the 5000
>for a while because of 486 glitches, however --- I don't know.

There were a couple of 486-related bugs that caused concern in the
early days of the 486 (circa end of 1989).  The first of these was the
bug with certain floating point operations, and the second was the bug
with the 486 EISA chip set.  The Altos 486/1000 was the first dedicated
486 UNIX machine to ship in December 1989, but all the units shipped
were equipped with B6 or later stepping of the 486 chip, which does not
have the floating point bug.  Also, since the 486/1000 is not ISA or
EISA based, it does not suffer from the second problem.

The Altos 486/5000 is EISA-based, but by the time the systems hit the
market, the EISA chip set bugs were already fixed.  Again, the none of
the Altos systems shipped has the above bugs.

We use the 486/5000 extensively in house here in Altos software
engineering, and have not seen any problems inherent in the 486.  Our
main development system, where all UNIX kernel, device driver,
utilities, communication software, and other work is done, is an Altos
486/5000 at 33MHz.  It has typically an average of 30+ users logged on,
often with several users doing extensive kernel code compilations.
This system also has in excess of 2GB of disk space (6 SCSI hard disks
and two SCSI tape drives, one of which is an Exabyte 8mm, connected to
two SCSI host adapters) and over 30 serial ports enabled, running on an
ethernet of some 80+ systems.  This should suffice to illustrate that
the system is quite well loaded with real work, and again, no 486
problems.

-Ti
-- 
Ti Kan | vorsprung durch technik!                                       \\\
Internet: ti at altos.com                                                   \\\
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