IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386? (2014)

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/ibm-blue-lightning-worlds-fastest-386/comment-page-1/

by WoodenChair • 3 years ago

142 38 3 years ago

johnklos• 3 years ago

The x86 world certainly had a lot of interesting outliers that other architectures, like m68k, never did. Sometimes I wonder how a 100 MHz m68030 with tons of cache would compare with an '040 or '060...

The Blue Lightning supports 80486 instructions, so it can run modern NetBSD. That'd make for some interesting observations.

sitzkrieg2• 3 years ago

very true, i also wonder if in some weird twist of fate some outlier like cyrix became the dominant x86 manufacturer and designers or something wack like that

userbinator• 3 years ago

IBM choosing x86 for the PC meant that development focused there, and back then it seemed IP/patents was less of an issue than it is today, so there was a lot more competition. There was at one time over a dozen independently designed x86 cores available as purchasable products:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

IP/patents was less of an issue than it is today, so there was a lot more competition.

There's a powerful lesson in here somewhere.

jpollock• 3 years ago

They weren't any less litigious, Intel sold licenses to the x86 architecture.

There were several fabs that had licenses, and there were lawsuits around whether or not they were transferable.

https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/intel-and-the-x86-archit...

formerly_proven• 3 years ago

back then it seemed IP/patents was less of an issue than it is today, so there was a lot more competition

Maybe it was rather because IBM required second sources, so Intel wouldn't have gotten the x86 win without licensing it to other manufacturers.

anthk• 3 years ago

Well, a 486 with an FPU @70mhz would stomp it.

shrubble• 3 years ago

The 40MHz 68040 would be a good one to use for comparison. This chip had block move instructions as did the 486 which greatly increases performance. Supposedly Motorola felt uncomfortable putting a heat sink on the CPU and thus they didn't increase the clock speed further...

mysterydip• 3 years ago

I know it wouldn't be a 1:1 comparison with an actul chip, but could this be done on an FPGA?

LargoLasskhyfv• 3 years ago

http://apollo-core.com running on not so fast and large FPGAs should give an impression. Now imagine that as ASIC on modern process nodes, coupled with HBM.

bigmattystyles2• 3 years ago

I was a kid back then but had some close family members who worked with these and I just had a flashback and remembered the joke was that they could spark, living up to the blue lightning name. Is that apocryphal? I have no way of checking the validity of that joke.

throwanem2• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure they were pulling your leg.

bigmattystyles2• 3 years ago

Just got one of them on the phone and they had no idea what I was talking about - so most likely a throwaway joke I believed and committed to memory all those years ago. :-)

cbsmith• 3 years ago

I remember these. I used to sell computers back in the day, and the DLC3's were notoriously "different" and therefore "buggy" with certain software. Not as bad as the later Blue Lightning chips that were based on Cyrix designs, but still...

manual89• 3 years ago

Back in the day I came across a PC port of Mortal Kombat II. The box had a label specifically stating that it would not run on the AMD CPUs of its day...

agumonkey• 3 years ago

It's funny how these days were forcing you to make choices, and people had to make it appealing. Now it's anything anywhere anytime and it feels like a swamp.

muxator• 3 years ago

What was the power consumption of these chips?

More interesting yet it would be to know the Power/speed ratio compared to modern chips.

jl6• 3 years ago

Interesting question - it’s not trivial to find a metric that’s directly comparable between a 486-era chip and a modern x86 chip. MHz isn’t the whole story, as modern chips have multiple cores and greatly improved instructions-per-cycle. Synthetic benchmarks like Whetstone might provide a point of comparison, but it’s hard to be sure the different benchmarkers were running the same version.

Wikipedia says the 386SLC from the article drew 2.5W at 25Mhz. A Ryzen mobile CPU draws something like 15W. My gut says the Ryzen is a lot more than 6x faster.

pavlov• 3 years ago

The 386SLC had 815,000 transistors manufactured on a 1.2-micron process (1,200 nm).

The Ryzen 7040 has 25 billion transistors manufactured on a 4nm process.

That’s 30,000x more transistors on a much more power efficient process. There’s no real-world task where the Ryzen won’t perform many orders of magnitude better. Anything involving floating point must be millions of times faster because the 386SLC didn’t have an FPU at all whereas the Ryzen has wide SIMD and an integrated GPU.

qubex• 3 years ago

MHz isn’t the whole story

MHz has never been any part of the story.

api• 3 years ago

Perspective: the 95MB/sec memory speed quoted here is roughly the same as gigabit Ethernet between stuff in my house. This speed can also be achieved by 802.11ax if you are reasonably close to the access point.

cmicali• 3 years ago

I bought a machine with a 75Mhz blue lightning "486" as an upgrade to a 386SX/20. It was sold as the budget 486 at the time, and I learned the lesson the hard way that sometimes budget really does mean a lot worse!

Performance wasn't great and compatibility was an issue more than you'd expect.

RecycledEle• 3 years ago

I got an IBM ThinkPad 500 sub-notebook as a high school graduation present in 1994. There is no documentation of it today. A different laptop is recorded as the ThinkPad 500. Mine had a 486slc-2 50 processor and 4 MB RAM that I later upgraded to 12 MB.

I think they were closeouts IBM decided not to mass produce.

sacnoradhq• 3 years ago

The fastest 386 was the 486SX. ;)

Interestingly, the 487SX was a complete 486DX that disabled the original 486SX.

https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/optics/olympusmicd/galleries/ch...

EDIT: IBM's LC chips were targeted at laptops initially but then found their way into embedded systems. Cyrex (used in the BL line) was often slightly ahead in performance and performance/price, but compatibility wasn't always there.

smileykenziekv• 3 years ago

This is mind-blowing, I can't help but feel a sense of nostalgia for this era of computing. The technical insights into its design and how it pushed the boundaries of performance for its time leaves me in awe of the engineering prowess at play.

IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386? (2014)

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