20 Facts About Intel i486

Intel 486, officially named i486 and known as 80486, is a microprocessor.

The Intel i486's improved performance is thanks to its five-stage pipeline with all stages bound to a single cycle.

At the announcement, Intel i486 stated that samples would be available in the third quarter and production quantities would ship in the fourth quarter.

Intel i486 attempted to prevent AMD from selling the processor, but AMD won in court, which allowed it to establish itself as a competitor.

AMD's long-running 1987 arbitration lawsuit against Intel i486 was settled in 1995, and AMD gained access to Intel i486's 80486 microcode.

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Intel i486 responded by making a Pentium OverDrive upgrade chip for 486 motherboards, which was a modified Pentium core that ran up to 83 MHz on boards with a 25 or 33 MHz front-side bus clock.

Instruction set of the Intel i486 is very similar to the i386, with the addition of a few extra instructions, such as CMPXCHG, a compare-and-swap atomic operation, and XADD, a fetch-and-add atomic operation that returned the original value .

Processors compatible with the Intel i486 were produced by companies such as IBM, Texas Instruments, AMD, Cyrix, UMC, and STMicroelectronics .

Motorola 68040, while not Intel i486 compatible, was often positioned as its equivalent in features and performance.

However, the Intel i486 had the ability to be clocked significantly faster without overheating.

Early Intel i486-based computers were equipped with several ISA slots and sometimes one or two 8-bit-only slots .

Late Intel i486 boards were normally equipped with both PCI and ISA slots, and sometimes a single VLB slot.

One of the earliest complete systems to use the Intel i486 chip was the Apricot VX FT, produced by British hardware manufacturer Apricot Computers.

Later Intel i486 boards supported Plug-And-Play, a specification designed by Microsoft that began as a part of Windows 95 to make component installation easier for consumers.

Computers based on the Intel i486 remained popular through the late 1990s, serving as low-end processors for entry-level PCs.

Production for traditional desktop and laptop systems ceased in 1998, when Intel i486 introduced the Celeron brand, though it continued to be produced for embedded systems through the late 2000s.

Windows 2000 could run on a Intel i486-based machine, although with a less than optimal performance, due to the minimum hardware requirement of a Pentium processor.

However, as they were overtaken by newer operating systems, Intel i486 systems fell out of use except for backward compatibility with older programs, especially given problems running on newer operating systems.

However, DOSBox was available for later operating systems and provides emulation of the Intel i486 instruction set, as well as full compatibility with most DOS-based programs.

In May 2006, Intel announced that production of the i486 would stop at the end of September 2007.