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When I was a kid we had a 486 DX, 33mhz machine. Pretty sweet eh? Well as it got older we tricked it out, added 8 megs of ram so we could place Space Quest 6 and an 2x External CD-Rom drive etc... I understand how most of those things worked now that I've got my CS degree although it's still a little hazy and magical.
But one thing I just realized I never understood was what was the big green Cyrix 586 overdrive chip that my dad put in to crank it up to 100mhz. Was 586 a misnomer or a marketing thing?
How were the Cyrix and Intel processors related so that you could switch these around? And, as an aside why don't AMD and Intel do similar things with their processors today?
Intel stopped using numbers (386, 486, 586) because the courts ruled that part numbers could not be patented. "Pentium" was meant to remind people of "five eighty six" without being a part number. – CarlF – 2011-07-18T18:55:32.077
3It was a trademark issue, not a patents one. – Linker3000 – 2011-07-18T19:23:26.473
1I had a laptop based on a 200 MHz Cyrix chip like that. To get maximum performance out of it you'd have to recompile with 486 instruction ordering and all of the Pentium instructions set switches that gcc supported. Pretty decent chip for its time. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten – 2011-07-18T20:30:12.980