*BSD News Article 18188


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From: adam@veda.is (Adam David)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Cyrix 486DLC & 386/NetBSD: Any point?
Message-ID: <C9uLAu.4Gt@veda.is>
Date: 8 Jul 93 13:25:27 GMT
References: <21fj9sINNcbj@hobbes.telco-nac.com>
Organization: Veda Systems, Iceland
Lines: 19

dave@telco-nac.com (David Cornejo) writes:

>Has anybody tried to use a Cyrix 486DLC with 386BSD or NetBSD
>successfully? If so was there any real improvement in performance?

It works. As can be expected the performance is better than a 386 and
worse than a 486.

>Also, besides the 486DLC missing the math coprocessor, what are
>the differences between the Cyrix & Intel parts? Can `486 code
>run on it?

The prefetch queue might work differently so automatic single-stepping might
not work the same, the Cyrix part only has 1kB of onchip cache but claims
faster integer arithmetic. 486 code runs fine so long as there is a coprocessor.
There are bound to be other differences, these are probably the main ones.

--
adam@veda.is