creepingnet
Veteran Member
When I last left off, I had procured a 1991 Compaq DeskPro 386s/20 with a IBM Blue Lightning Upgrade chip of some sort in it, and I think I finally figured out what this chip actually is.
It's the Evergreen upgrade. - https://www.ardent-tool.com/fspencer/8580proc.htm
Basically it came in clock doubled and clock tripled versions, and like another person said on my previous post to this blog, it's the rare 16K cache BLX3 upgrade chip. Turns out this site had the drivers for it too, so I downloaded them (it's something like to486.exe or something like that and requires a 720K floppy - I'll mirror it on my site when I'm done building out the new build of it).
Once those drivers loaded - HOLY CRAP this thing flies. It's almost on par with one of my DX2 or DX4 machines. Kind of shocking it can get that far along on a motherboard designed for a pokey little 20Mhz 386SX. But what does this mean for me? TWO retro machines in one computer - a slower, 286-classish 386SX in one, and a faster 486DX-ish thing in another. Arachne SCREAMS on it, almost somewhat better than on my DX4-100 somehow (and good thing).
Too bad nobody's still making these, and not a lot of them were made. It'd make a lot of 386SX based computers far more useful for what us retrocomputing enthusiasts use them for, and allow some of us to have only one vintage machine that fits the bill of many. It'd also give some value to a 386SX. Maybe this is something I should look into at some point.
The only downside is TopBench, SysChk, SpeedSys, and a lot of other benchmark/sys info utilities puke on themselves, as well as Links for DOS (so no Links browser, will need to do the TLS hack for Arachne instead). So I can't really benchmark much, did manage to look at the performance differences in TopBench though, just can't add the machine to the database. I'm guessing that "piggyback" CPU confuses some utilities.
Still though, being able to hot-swap using DOS multiboot config between two different CPU is quite cool indeed.
It's the Evergreen upgrade. - https://www.ardent-tool.com/fspencer/8580proc.htm
Basically it came in clock doubled and clock tripled versions, and like another person said on my previous post to this blog, it's the rare 16K cache BLX3 upgrade chip. Turns out this site had the drivers for it too, so I downloaded them (it's something like to486.exe or something like that and requires a 720K floppy - I'll mirror it on my site when I'm done building out the new build of it).
Once those drivers loaded - HOLY CRAP this thing flies. It's almost on par with one of my DX2 or DX4 machines. Kind of shocking it can get that far along on a motherboard designed for a pokey little 20Mhz 386SX. But what does this mean for me? TWO retro machines in one computer - a slower, 286-classish 386SX in one, and a faster 486DX-ish thing in another. Arachne SCREAMS on it, almost somewhat better than on my DX4-100 somehow (and good thing).
Too bad nobody's still making these, and not a lot of them were made. It'd make a lot of 386SX based computers far more useful for what us retrocomputing enthusiasts use them for, and allow some of us to have only one vintage machine that fits the bill of many. It'd also give some value to a 386SX. Maybe this is something I should look into at some point.
The only downside is TopBench, SysChk, SpeedSys, and a lot of other benchmark/sys info utilities puke on themselves, as well as Links for DOS (so no Links browser, will need to do the TLS hack for Arachne instead). So I can't really benchmark much, did manage to look at the performance differences in TopBench though, just can't add the machine to the database. I'm guessing that "piggyback" CPU confuses some utilities.
Still though, being able to hot-swap using DOS multiboot config between two different CPU is quite cool indeed.
