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Great post. The most interesting thing to me was how historically significant the 386SL turned out to be. I had always mentally slotted it as a cheap cut-down p
by twoodfin 3y ago
Great post. The most interesting thing to me was how historically significant the 386SL turned out to be. I had always mentally slotted it as a cheap cut-down part for the emerging laptop market, but it actually was a relatively sophisticated (3X the transistors!) precursor of the modern SoC.
- rasz 3y agoLevel of integration wasnt the thing that made 386SL special, there were 8088/8086 SoCs before it like NEC V40 used in 1987 Zenith Eazy PC or V50 in 1988 Akai S1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20#Variants_and_successors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20#Variants_and_successor... What made 386SL special was introduction of System Management Mode (SMM). Intel sued AMD over Am386 SMM implementation, AMD tried claiming its not really SMM but jut some left over debugging ICE implementation :D https://ir.amd.com/sec-filings/content/0000898430-94-000804/EX-99_1.txt https://ir.amd.com/sec-filings/content/0000898430-94-000804/...