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Strange haul; Texas Instruments 486??

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NathanAllan

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It's a 486 with a hardwired processor and math coprocessor (pics soon) and the chip says TI on it, complete with logo. Tomorrow I'll try to take some pictures and post them in my Picasa. Some things that I remember from looking at it:

all ISA slots
30-pin simm memory with two slots full, two empty
5.25" drive, 3.5" drive
IBM brand hard drive, don't remember the size
large din keyboard connector, AT style
my friend hooked it all up and win95 started on 4mb ram that was there.

Pics soon!
 
TI made the 486SLC CPU which was a direct replacement for the 386SX but was faster... then they made a short lived 486SX variant but I didn't see very many of those on the market.
 
486 with a seperate math coprocessor would make is a 486SX or 486SLC (386 pinouts). Waiting for the pics.
 
From the look of the chip, that is the early 486SLC which is merely a 386SX with a little cache added. 16 MB max ram; be a challenge getting that to handle modern websites.

Same as the Cyrix model; TI being one of the companies that manufactured for Cyrix.

Nice little box from the video.

The mysterious card adapter looks like it might be for an old scanner; the second port (4 pin) was for power.
 
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TI made a range of 486 chips. The SLC was a lower-cost, lower-performance alternative to the Intel 486 products. It was sometime around this time when Intel started its "Intel Inside" campaign, as vendors were advertising "486" systems with the SLC chips inside, which, if the customer was expecting the Intel chip, was something of a ripoff.
 
I remember having a TI 486DLC processor in the first machine I ever built.

I bought it because I wanted something better than a 386, yet could not afford an Intel 486 at the time. This must have been around 1992 or so.

I had no complaints about the performance or the compatibility of the CPU, but the buggy DMA controller on the OPTi motherboard caused me a lot of grief with some games. But that was of course not the fault of the processor.
 
Got pics at my picasa page. Here is the direct link for one and then click forward.

http://picasaweb.google.com/nathan.dkassandra4/UntitledAlbum#5469034963478153074

This was definitely a custom job with that IDE external interface, which is really neat. I'd liek to get a CD-rom that can use that. I might have had one once, long ago, but it's gone now. I remember that power connector (krebizfan you almost had it, the cable goes directly to a cd-rom input on the soundcard).
 
channelmaniac said:
TI made the 486SLC CPU which was a direct replacement for the 386SX but was faster... then they made a short lived 486SX variant but I didn't see very many of those on the market.
Click to expand...

It would have 486 instructions too right?
 
486SLC from Cyrix/TI should be fully i486SX instruction compatible.

I think I own the motherboard shown in the computer, only mine has AMD 386SX-40 installed instead. It's okay, but the fact that it lacks L2 cache and memory interleaving really hurts performance. I have an old AMI 386SX motherboard that supports both L2 cache and memory interleaving, and it's a real beast.
 
NathanAllan said:
Got pics at my picasa page. Here is the direct link for one and then click forward.

http://picasaweb.google.com/nathan.dkassandra4/UntitledAlbum#5469034963478153074
Click to expand...

The Cyrix/TI/SGS 486SLC is essentially a 386SX with the 486 instruction set added and a 1 kB internal cache. The SLC/e variant is a low-power version with support for APM, normally used in laptops, although it still runs at 5 volts. (The SLC/e-V is the 3.3 volt version.) Cyrix did not make their own chips; Texas Instruments and SGS-Thomson made the CPUs for Cyrix, and both also sold them under their own names.

The "4C87SLC-40" is equivalent to a 387SX-40 math coprocessor. And due to it being based on 386SX architecture, the 486SLC still has a maximum RAM limit of 16 MB, and the external bus is only 16 bits. Some later 486SLC motherboards have "32-bit" VESA Local Bus slots, although performance is drastically reduced since they have to split the data into two 16-bit chunks at a time.

This is not to be confused with the IBM 486SLC, which has a much larger 16 kB internal cache and thus is a bit more peppy.
 
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