*updating* 8088's

[Jim Leonard]

Chris M wrote:
> --- Alexis <thrashbarg at kaput.homeunix.org> wrote:
>  
>> You might run into an issue of minimum clock speed
>> too. I don't know what
>> the minimum for the 386/486 is. I know RISC
>> microcontrollers can go down to
>> DC, but the 8386/486 might not.
> 
>  Presumably the boards these things come with have
> their own crystals. I would not expect a '486 upgrade
> for a '286 to run at 8mhz or anything comparable (but
> Tony could tell us).

They did indeed.  Which brings us to why these were stopgaps at best: 
The processing may have been faster, but the memory/bus interface was 
the same, so you were not truly getting the overall performance of the 
real machine (that's why the advertised benchmarks were careful to 
demonstrate how much faster the upgraded machine was compared to how it 
was before, and NOT to a "real" 386).
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)            http://www.oldskool.org/
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