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ZFx86™ 486 PC-in-a-Chip

Not necessarily off-topic, but is this actually available, as in, can it be bought from somewhere?
 
I have one of the ESA 486AVR motherboards that uses this chip. As onre mentions whenever the chip gets mentioned the question is whether it is still being made or if this is all NOS stuff.
 
Okay, I don't know if this sight is relevant now after reading that the company had a dispute with National Semiconductor. A company that died eleven years ago.
 
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Traveler said:
I guess it was an interesting soc.
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Two interesting things about it are that it does not support L2 cache, so it fares poorly on benchmarks versus a real 486DX4-100 or Am5x86, and at least on the ESA-486AVR, the chip cannot do DMA channel 1 and PCI bus mastering at the same time (shared pin), which rules out using an ethernet card in the PCI slot.
 
I have a 486 that was used in a cash register. Am5x86 with 100 MHz and *no* L2 cache. Guess what, the missing L2 cache has not much impact.

People should really stop doing benchmarks on retro PCs (because it's silly on obsolete tech) and just use them the way they were intended - that is, for running retro games.
 
Timo W. said:
People should really stop doing benchmarks on retro PCs (because it's silly on obsolete tech) and just use them the way they were intended - that is, for running retro games.
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For some people the benchmark is the game.
 
Timo W. said:
People should really stop doing benchmarks on retro PCs (because it's silly on obsolete tech) and just use them the way they were intended - that is, for running retro games.
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Benchmarking a retro machine and comparing with similar machines tells you whether your machine is configured and working properly. In my opinion, this is useful information. There is little point in playing retro games on a retro machine in a worse way than they were intended for.
 
Svenska said:
Benchmarking a retro machine and comparing with similar machines tells you whether your machine is configured and working properly. In my opinion, this is useful information. There is little point in playing retro games on a retro machine in a worse way than they were intended for.
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Another thing is that reading the datasheets of the 486 and a good 486 chipset (like the SiS 471), their discussions of how the RAM timings and caches work, and playing with/tuning such things has been far more informative for me at least than having read up on this stuff in a computer architecture university course.
 
In the late 90s I obtained several 386 based ISA and stand alone 386 board that contained ZF Micro Systems module. I unfortunately sold then around 2000. I do have several floppies with information/flash files on the 386 ZF modules still and have the ISA schematics and board layout files. I had the stand alone board running a router for my DSL feed with the built in Ethernet interface and a Ethernet PC104 interface. Here are some pix of the module I have now. I want to make a board for it.

GregIMG_5012.JPGIMG_5011.JPGIMG_5010.JPG
 
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