The Forbidden and Forgotten UMC Green 486 CPU

[@erinwiebe7026]

In the mid 90's, I worked at a small, local (also Canadian) computer shop. It was one of my first jobs out of high school, and well before my IT career. I helped do all kinds of jobs there, including building made to order clone PC's. It was the mid 486 era, and we sold mostly Intel & AMD 486's. The shop owner showed up with a UMC 486 33 one day and at the time it was considered an oddity and it ended up sitting on the shelf for months before we finally decided to build a system around it. Seeing it run, I remember being rather surprised how well it benchmarked, and I wondered why we didn't see more of these CPU's making their way into new builds. It was the first and only UMC 486 CPU I ever encountered in person and your video brought back some fond memories of working at that little computer shop. Thanks!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much and thanks for sharing! Always love to hear these kinds of stories from back in the 90s 👍

[@wowitsshit9734]

Ywnbaw

[@АндрейМилованов-у9у]

similar biography, but w/o GREEN CPU, few years before (begining of 90s) and in Russia

[@idahofur]

I remember the name but, I don't think the shop I worked for sold any.

[@dumiicris2694]

benchmarked back then? and i had 80 mhz amd so i so what it can do.. u have 12 16 33 .. 120 mhz what benchmarked? unbelievable.. first cpus 1 transistor and 1 resistor benchmarked? im speechless i can not beleve this sorry benchmarked because of faster ram or nice video card .. can not beleve this sorry .. a cpu that needs fast routines to make some graphics fast enough .. thank god i never seen benchmark back then..machine code everything if u want for things to move normal and yeah everything was a pain in the butt benchmarked!! :))))

[@georgeh6856]

I am glad you said you are Canadian. When I saw that "NOT FOR U.S. SALE" label, I was about to call the CPU police.

[@vswitchzero]

😂

[@cryptocsguy9282]

😂😂😂😂 I think the CPU police is the US government nowadays

[@the_beefy1986]

I love the use of Gameboy cart cases to store CPUs

[@tetsi0815]

I wonder where all the game cartridges are...

[@Sarge92]

@@tetsi0815 you can buy those brand new empty

[@bubu5908]

@@tetsi0815 In In the CPU packaging, of course.

[@rolux4853]

Yes! All my old CPUs are in a drawer with some dividers to separate them. Now I feel guilty that they slide around if you open and close that drawer a bit more quickly.

[@robertsmith2956]

I keep all mine in the box they came in when I bought them. Takes up a lot more room that way.

[@ugzz]

I remember "Zipping" Quake 1 onto about 15 floppies with max compression and a 1.4mb split. Backpacking that to a friends across town. All 15 floppies worked, recombining the zip worked. Fully extracted no problem.. We were SOOO geeked!.. Then we learned about FPUs.. No quake on a SX 486.. Such disappointment!

[@mirkoslavko3703]

There was a FPU Emulator, it worked well on my 486sx25@33 MHz.

[@John_Smith100]

Similar story splitting game demo downloads at school and taking them home across multiple floppies, then figuring out which split had failed CRC check. Got caught once hiding the download window behind a fake picture of a bare desktop.

[@ugzz]

​@@mirkoslavko3703 Whaaaa?? (mind blown!)

[@shelterbloodfallen8851]

Or Duke Nukem 3D, Transfer with Floppys. Ready to start Multiplay with Modem (No Internet, direct to a friend. Late afternoon).... oha Mainboard has a ... 8000er Serial RS232 Manage Chip. Makes the game unsyncing .... damm fast , i buyed a new Mainboard only for that game 🙂 Hahaha.... payback time!!!

[@jimbotron70]

​@@mirkoslavko3703No way working well for such a demanding game.

[@tcpnetworks]

I used a UMC U5S in an embedded machine back in the mid-1990's. It was in charge of producing glass bottles at a production facility - in charge of 14 stampers and 2 furnaces, it kept everything working nicely.

[@geografiainfinitului]

That UMC logo looks something straight out of Robocop

[@bleeedthebrakes]

At least UMC did learn from this and spawned into all other architectures that intel hadn't had their hands on. Mediatek, Novatek, JMicron, ITE, SiS, Faraday are all part of the UMC franchise.

[@SianaGearz]

Huh. SiS chipsets had the fastest memory controllers for a while, and were actually sort of robust and not too buggy.

[@glitchwrks]

Neat! I'd seen the UMC CPUs mentioned in motherboard jumper tables but never actually saw one in the wild.

[@udirt]

Same, I only remember that blue lighting ibm cpu as Enigma 3rd party cpu that was notably fast. Would have been cool to have had one of those!

[@Rouxenator]

I remember these, they were pretty common here in South Africa. My cousin has the SX40

[@Fusso]

Brazilian here. Had one those around 1995. It was pretty common. What I never saw was an original Intel one.

[@MrBooMY3]

My first personal experience with over clocking was the main seller at our old computer shop. It was the AMD DX4-133 I had setup for a customer. I accidentally set the bus speed to 40mhz and saw the 160mhz on the screen as it counted RAM and booted up. I was like 160 oops but i have to benchmark it and see is it stable. I ran that one with the flying pc and keypad and it smoked any score I'd ever seen come from my shop including the previous record holder which I think was a P75. It was perfectly stable in anything I played which included Doom of course. When we told him he got a free over clocking upgrade he was like sweet. We sold a bunch of them because it was significantly cheaper than the Pentium but performed just as well in most things at the 160mhz clock. I always tried 50mhz but never got one to run reliably at that speed even with extra fans cut from old power supplies.

[@Zerbey]

Never heard of this before, but yeah I'm blown away by those benchmarks. Wish I'd known about these in the 1990s!

[@intrinia]

And I thought I have seen every 486 manufactor. Great video!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much! 🙂

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Look at the Texas Instruments and ST Microelectronics 486

[@intrinia]

@@HappyBeezerStudios Have some of them laying around. ;-)

[@the_kombinator]

0:05 - I thought I was very much the only one storing 486/Pentium CPUs EXACTLY THAT WAY lol.

[@ahu747]

Bro i grrw up tinkering with 486dx 50s, dx2 66s, then a pentium 133. All your videos bring back so much memories

[@briangoldberg4439]

Intel probably saw them as a real threat with those performance numbers. I mean, in productivity software, you wouldn't really need to upgrade to a Pentium until Windows 95 came out

[@effexon]

ah good old block dealerships to take competition by shady threats.

[@ville_syrjala]

I see no source for that 7 cycle integer division claim in wikipedia. Would be cool to actually test that. The "AGP" model of the Millennium II is in fact just a PCI device, and AGP runs at 66MHz, so it's possible that most Millennium II's can handle that frequency just fine, unless Matrox had to use special binned chips for the AGP cards.

[@udirt]

IIRC the et6100 etc were also quite overclock friendly

[@PiDsPagePrototypes]

Those things were so hard to get a hold of when brand new, then they were a pain to set up, and then suddenly they were everywhere, being tossed out with the Dell and HP business workstations they were standard fit in. The long sockets on their side were for the Video Graphics Overlay board that used software for doing Lower Thirds and the like in TV stations.

[@SianaGearz]

AGP will gracefully degrade to older PCI standards if need be, so a card doesn't need to support 66MHz.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@SianaGearz A bit like with the Voodoo cards, which never made use of all the fancy AGP features.

[@Telecasterland]

Am5x86 133 overclocked to 160 was the king of the hill of the 486 boards.

[@lynnjr457]

Even though they tended to overheat during long production usage. I worked for a company that decided instead of going to legitimate pentiums, we would deploy those overclock cpus. Until we figured out the overheating issue, we had months of machines hanging up randomly. Eventually we modified some 1U appliance fans with much higher RPMs that kept the CPUs cool.

[@Lalasoth]

@@lynnjr457 I had one of those but never had that issue. Was awesome for its time. When I would tell people about it I usually received nothing but disbelief.

[@IronwingTechHaven]

This is so cool! I've never even heard of it. Awesome video. I especially loved the overclocking section.

[@repatch43]

Is it crazy that I still care about benchmark results for 486 class CPUs? No, not crazy at all. Great video!

[@vswitchzero]

Haha thanks very much! 😁👍

[@aemerox5773]

You just answered a question that I was looking for for almost a decade. I remember talking about it a long time ago to KZbinr who went by the name WayBackTech and had made a review on UMC Green. I asked if this CPU was forbidden to be sold in the US, this doesn't include the rest of North America. This meant Canada and possibly Mexico could get their hands on one. Well that question was finally answered.

[@poseidon3032]

My dad bought me an AT IBM compatible mid tower that contained an AMD 386DX. When i got frustrated with trying to play Doom, found a computer shop in downtown of our city and upgraded the motherboard along with an AMD 486 DX2-80. Before the end of that era, I had outfitted it with an AMD 486 DX4-120. When later in 1999, I opted for a prebuilt eMachine with a Celeron 466 mhz, I gave it to a friend, much to my own chagrine. It ended up having 8 megs of memory, a WD 1.2 GB hard drive, a SCSI Plextor (I didn't research enough before I bought it) CD drive, Trident SuperVGA video card, Orchid sound card, and it ran Windows 95. I kick myself every day for not hanging onto it. I played Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Hexen, Xwing, Panzer General, and Myst on it. The Windows 95 disk even had the Rob Roy previev which i watched with fascination. The beginnings of what would later become the MPEG, WMV, QuickTime, and AVI video standards that we know of today.

[@djlim4612]

I miss Cyrix. Used their 6X86 up to MII. Thanks to them, my family could afford to buy PCs for me and my siblings. Thanks for the video..I really haven't heard of UMC processors. Winchips, Cyrix , Nexgens ..wish they are still around.

[@JeremyLevi]

Same. I had both a Cyrix 5x86-100GP and later a M2 6x86MX-PR200 (150Mhz). The 586 was a bit of a stinker but the price was right and was still a big upgrade from my previous AMD 486DX40. The M2 was a great chip, ran flawlessly at a 75MHz bus x2 clock multiplier for years.

[@paulmcgrath2175]

I also had 150Mhz 6x86, mine had ibm markings, as they made the chips for cyrix.

[@djlim4612]

@@JeremyLevi Awesome. Mine was a 6x86 P-166+. And then the M2-333 came along. (My brother bought a Via Cyrix III thereafter but sadly i've never gotten to use it). All 3 were relatively slow in gaming but it was affordable and lower the bars of many families to owning a PC. Team Red all the way after the sad demise of Cyrix. Now my Cyrix 6x86 cpu is on display next to my Ryzen PC. Beautiful golden chip.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

They sort of still are around. Cyrix sold the division to VIA which are still around and still make x86 chips. Cyrix MediaGX went to become AMD Geode NexGen were taken over by AMD and their RISC86 design powers the K5 WinChip were made by Centaur, then owned by IDT and later sold to VIA, where they made the C3and the succeeding designs, including the recent Zhaoxin stuff. And UMC are also still around and one of the biggest semiconductor producers worldwide.

[@djlim4612]

@@HappyBeezerStudios Agreed. But what i meant for them to be "around" is for them to still sell CPUs on the market to average joes, like AMD & Intel. Would be bloody awesome to have a battle between AMD Ryzen 7800x3d, Intel 14900K (if they don't explode beforehand) and "Cyrix CX 9000" yeah :D

[@Bluecedor]

I remember that once I had convinced my parents to buy a quite expensive 486 DX2 66 in 1993, I soon started seeing the Pentium 60 and 66 hit the shelves. Then AFTER that, I started seeing DX3-75s, DX4-100s, and a dozen other permutations.

[@ToTheGAMES]

Keeping CPU's in Gameboy cases is a smart idea! I'm gonna do that too, thanks!

[@ninja011]

I used to have a system with a U5D in it. It was a custom tower built by a system integrator in Montreal when I lived there. I used it for school work and later upgraded it to a Pentium OverDrive socket-compatible CPU.

[@josephalbrecht3735]

Thanks for a very informative and interesting video. I just picked up 486 VLB system with a PC Chips M912 v1.7 motherboard. I purchased UMC 486 Super40 that I will be using in this system. I never used one the CPUs back in the 90s and now it is going to be a lot fun to try this out!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for watching! Very nice, enjoy the new retro system 🙂👍

[@josephalbrecht3735]

@@vswitchzero I got the UMC 486 CPU today and it works just fine in the PC Chips M912 v1.7 motherboard. This motherboard has specific jumper settings for the UMC 486 CPU. Interestly, those jumper settings differ from a standard Intel 486SX.

[@WalrusFPGA]

Impressive numbers and OC capability from this little known chip! Loved the overview here. Thanks for sharing

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much! 🙂👍

[@retroboby007]

I have a motherboard with UMC chipsets, but I didnt knew they made CPUs. Very interesting stuff. And you have a cool testing system too. I saw your 486 dx2 66mhz reaching 49 score in 3d Bench. Very nice! My 486 dx2 66mhz never gets pasted 45 score in 3d Bench, even with VLB or PCI video card.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Time to tweak stuff. And check things like fastvid and mtrrlfbe

[@emlyndewar]

I don't know why this was recommended to me, but I'm glad it was!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much for watching! 🙂👍

[@RetroTinkerer]

That is one cool rare CPU thanks for sharing!

[@makingtechsense126]

What a trip down memory lane. In the early 90's my parents decided to buy a computer for the entire family to use. It had an Intel 486/SX-16 in it. Needless to say, it wasn't great. At some point we upgraded to an IBM 486DX2-66. I have never heard of the UMC Green 486 so thank you for sharing! Seems like UMC had a very talented engineering team. Too bad Intel killed off their CPU business.

[@ryanyoder7573]

There is no 486 SX 16. The 25 was the lowest clock speed 486 SX.

[@ryanyoder7573]

Hah. I checked Wikipedia and I was wrong. I built hundreds of computers back then but literally never saw a SX 16 or 20.

[@makingtechsense126]

​@@ryanyoder7573- No worries. I had to double check my memory too. Obviously it was an outlier.

[@vswitchzero]

They are actually quite difficult to find these days! Would love to find an SX-16 one of these days. They were typically only used in OEM machines. I believe the 16s were exclusively found in some Dell models.

[@luke5957]

Wow where has this channel been, subbed

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much for watching! :)

[@kasimirdenhertog3516]

Great stuff, subscribed! I had seen this chip featured by other KZbinrs, but you add some interesting details to the story.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much! 🙂👍

[@YarisTex]

All of us should spam UMC like crazy for them to do a production run of these 486’s on a more advanced node. 1GHz UMC 486

[@yournamehere23435]

I'd be interesting to see how fast a 486 could be just for the fun of it

[@virtualtools_3021]

​@@yournamehere23435especially wince just 6 days ago someone finally modded xp to work on 486

[@briangoldberg4439]

lol. what would you run on it?

[@jbaroli]

What bus frequency it would run? On which motherboard?

[@RuSrsbro]

​​@@jbaroliThey would have to engineer a way for the chip to run asynchronous to the bus speed, anything above 100 MHz is just not feasible

[@Fortunes.Fool.]

We had a Dell 386/25 and a friend’s dad had a Gateway 486/66. I was blown away how fast that was when we installed games on it. Seeing a Cyrix chip brought back 90s memories, so cool.

[@rfmerrill]

It's so weird to be reminded that UMC has such a big presence and such "serious" products when they're also known as the biggest manufacturer of clone NES chips. Their NES CPU and PPU design are probably the most common ones to find besides Nintendo's own.

[@ElNeroDiablo]

YT randomly rec'd this vid to me, was an interesting watch about a piece of PC tech history.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for watching! 🙂👍

[@MrEditor6000]

It's just amazing to even look at older chips, because it looks like you have a whole power plant under that lid.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

I picked up a few at the scrapyard. I think they're neat!

[@tech5882]

I built my BBS machine with UMC chip. It worked just fine while... it was cool. There was no a cooler designed specifically for the chip as far as I know. So I had to make my own cooling set up. Most of summer time case was wide open and had an additional desktop cooler blowing air into the case. :D

[@tngaskell]

Thanks for making this video! I was just thinking about the Green earlier this week but have, of course, never seen one in person.

[@TalesofWeirdStuff]

I always thought it would be fun to pair a UMC Green with a Weitek 4167. Rare CPU + ultra rare FPU = 😍

[@vswitchzero]

Haha would be very cool 😁 .. hoping one day I’ll find a Weitek 4167.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

The 90s were so wild. Besides x86 with Intel, AMD, Cyrix, VIA, Texas Instruments, IBM themselves, UMC, ST, and a bunch more, there were also lots of other architectures still around. PowerPC, i960, Arm, 68k, SPARC Alpha, PA-RISC, AVR, SuperH, M32R

[@indiocolifa]

Wow!! I didnt know UMC 486 clones were so good. I remember them but In my mind they were in the same league as Cyrix or IBM SLC , great video

[@GarthBeagle]

Crazy, had no idea these were that good!

[@bigwave_dave8468]

Early on when the 486 came out, there was no low-power model. For that reason, we used a Cyrix 386 with an outboard fpu for a portable compute solution.

[@boardernut]

there were never a Cyrix 386 on the market.

[@SUCRA]

Great video. Amazing results for the Green CPU. If they did 3x multiplier version of it they would compete with the first pentiums. Very interesting!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks, Bruno! 🙂👍

[@tiemanowo]

Watching your videos, I can imagine what channels like JayTwoCents or GamersNexus would look like if they were posted videos from the 90s.

[@vswitchzero]

Haha that comment really makes my day 😁 .. thanks so much 👍

[@spladam3845]

Wow, that part is impressive, I wish I had access to these back in the day, I wonder how much they could be had for.

[@Phantomwiz1985]

Bloody rippa of a video mate. Just awesome. Good stuff

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much! 😁👍

[@HTMLEXP]

That stability in an under-voltage scenario would have made the UMC.486s great for laptops of the time I would have thought.

[@Vanessaira-Retro]

Superb video! Great overview on this CPU.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks so much! Glad you enjoyed it 👍

[@wei48221]

The guy that worked on developing the UMC x86 CPU left UMC and started his own company call RDC which is still developing x86 compatible CPUs and SOCs today.

[@jermz79]

I remember seeing an ad for a 60mhz CPU at Fry's Electronics on the back page of a newspaper and thought they probably mixed up CPU speed and hard drive capacity.

[@tapy5696]

It really was an amazing processor, when I first had the chance to test it I immediately ditched my Intel DX33. Its potential for overclocking resulted in the frequent addition of the designation by rogue vendors. I have a U5S-SUPER25-33 in my collection which was supposed to suggest its default operation at 33MHz.

[@doq]

The vendor string is "UMC UMC UMC " because the vendor string is 12 characters long and that pads it out perfectly. VIA Technologies had their vendor strings as "VIA VIA VIA " for the same reason.

[@wpyoga]

And they wouldn't repeat their name 4 times because the number 4 is perceived to be bad luck by the Chinese.

[@hwertz10]

I tried to get one of these back in the day, before I found out they were essentially not available in the US. After my 386sx16, I ended up first with an IBM 486SLC2 (which was horrible, it was actually a 386 made compatible with a 486 socket, including the 386's 16MB RAM limit .) It was fine at first, but I ended up with this stuipd thing in a VESA Local Bus motherboard, only to find the video memory was mapped past 16MB -- it did some wraparound thing with the memory so the VRAM was mapped at like 8MB or so. When I had 8MB RAM it worked. When I bumped it up to 16MB, all hell broke loose since the VRAM and some of the system RAM's address spaces overlapped.) I went AMD after that -- K5, K6, K6-2. All served me well.

[@aleksandarsusnjar9574]

DX50 is for specialized systems and cases. Pair it with proper memory for memory-intensive processing or, with 50MHz-capable VLB video cards for it to shine.

[@envoycdx]

Do you mean use cases? Examples would be appreciated as I have a DX50 sat on the bench :)

[@JeremyLevi]

The trick was always finding VLB cards that ran stable at 50MHz. Maybe by now we know all the good ones but getting a stable config back in the day was a real case of trial and error. I knew more than one local beige-box PC retailers in those days that refused to build DX50-based systems for that exact reason, it just wasn't worth the support headaches.

[@mattelder1971]

@@JeremyLevi The DX2-66 was just all around better for most people. Lots of software just refused to run correctly on the DX50, even if the system was otherwise stable. However, I do recall one friend coming across one odd game (I can't recall what it was) that absolutely refused to run on ANY clock doubled chip, but worked perfectly on the DX50. It must have had some kind of timer or something that compared the bus speed and the clock speed and wouldn't run if they didn't match.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@mattelder1971 makes me wonder what other processors that game can be forced to run with.

[@epickh64]

486's are my favorite CPUs of all time (closely followed by the MOS 6502). I love to see videos about them. ^^

[@davidfernengel1825]

Excellent video, thank you! What an interesting CPU. It's a pity they could'nt continue selling CPUs.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for watching! 🙂👍

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Would be interesting to see more niche CPUs. Stuff like the Transmeta chips and how usable C3 and C7 were compared to their direct competitors.

[@revcrussell]

Still working on building my all-UMC machine: chipset, processor, SRAM, VGA, super I/O

[@ferencszabo3504]

When they shared the same socket type, those were the good times!

[@SickanFilms-ym3lj]

I worked at a company back in the day where we imported components for the company's computer brand from Taiwan. We used UMC Green for the low price range. I remember it had some small issue with a certain software but made a very good computer for the price. I even visited the factory in Taiwan once.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for sharing! 👍

[@ausnorman8050]

Great Vid. I was just wondering on the 60Mhz OC, was unstable due to voltage or temp? Would putting anything on the ceramic top help dissipate the heat and make it 'more' stable?

[@vswitchzero]

I didn’t show it in the video but I had a decent sized heatsink and fan on the chip for all the overclocking tests. Cooling did help because the chip was always more stable when cool and would go down hill after running for 10 minutes or so. Would love to get a super-40 which is probably better binned. Thanks for watching! 👍

[@nazgulsenpai]

Using those GameBoy cartridge cases for CPUs is genius :o

[@mattelder1971]

I was in the Navy stationed in Asia at the time and I seem to recall seeing these processors. If I had known how good they were, I would have bought one back then.

[@electricroo]

Nice, I have an AMD 486 DX4-120SV8B. For a number of years I've been looking out for an old 486 laptop 40mhz buss with a socketed CPU to stick it in.

[@ahabwolf7580]

Very cool, thank you!

[@frankl1955]

"Don't Copy That Floppy"... In the early 90s I got a program written by some NASA engineers to bypass Copy Protection on floppies. They called it "Copy Fight protection" and that all info should be free to everyone. It was like the wild west of PCs.

[@JeremyLevi]

Nice to see some performance tests for this rare bird and especially overclock performance. Now I'm curious how well it'd test out on a good VLB motherboard on those higher bus frequencies. I'd also be curious to see if there's any difference on your board with the jumpers set to standard Intel settings vs the UMC config just to see if there's maybe any chipset specific optimizations going on there to help out the UMC CPU performance.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for watching! I’ve never had much luck getting VLB to run stable at 50MHz, unfortunately. In my limited testing, I saw no difference between the UMC jumper settings and the Intel SX when it comes to performance. I wonder if it has something to do with the power features perhaps? Would like to look more into this at some point.

[@JeremyLevi]

@@vswitchzero That's a great point. It's certainly possible the UMC settings on the motherboard jumpers are related to the unique power saving features of the CPU.

[@ig8___]

I bought this when Starcraft released, upgrading from 66mhz to 120mhz - getting past the pentium 75hz required for Starcraft. Also 1st processor upgrade for me

[@Sekir80]

Why isn't this video came out 30 years ago? It would have been a great source for selecting processors.

[@KlopsKopp]

Love ur Gameboy Cartige Cases 😄

[@IBM_Museum]

The Intel S-spec 'SX911' (486DX2-66) shown during the intro is great for a baseline of the last Intel DX2 with the standard 8Kb Write-Through L1 cache - You need to get the 'SX955' S-spec for a comparison of any speed boost for Write-Back L1 as compared to Write-Through. That test is made slightly more easily at the Intel 486DX4 level since there are more batches to 16Kb L1 in WB or WT. Another note that the POD63/POD83 can be really nutty with L2 cache (typically 128 or 256Kb if present) on the motherboard.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Yeah, it comes pretty close to the 35 fps for doom, and that was recomended on a DX2-66

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment! I’ve been keeping an eye out for an SX955 and the DX/50 SX954. Would love to try them out. I do have an &EW DX4 with 16KB WB L1. Interesting that you mention that the POD can have issues with L2 cache. I was always surprised that the cache latency benchmarks were pretty poor with the POD. Thanks for watching 🙂👍

[@everTriumph]

I seem to remember a version of the 486 to fit the 386 pinout, so you could upgrade your 386 system to 486 by just swapping the cpu. May even have one in the bits box.

[@vswitchzero]

Indeed! There were a few but the most popular was probably the Cyrix DLC. Hoping to do a video on it some day 👍

[@Fifury161]

I recall these CPUs and still have a few. As for the DX-50 I had to swap it out for a DX2-66 as the the motherboard couldn't support bus mastering when used with 2 VL SCSI cards and gave lots of r/w errors.

[@user-kn3sv6jg4h]

So lost and forgotten it was slid into a time stream without the originators knowing what they were doing. Seriously, this is one of those 'Farrel' things for me. I was into all of the chips as a kid growing up, I still have my original K6's and Cyrix chips. This thing... this is someone trying to get their foot in the door.

[@mattkuba9933]

great idea to test against the Pentium OverDrive with the fan disconnected!

[@kirkh4205]

(14:55) I have never seen a USB to IDE adapter like the one you're using. Does it also have nand flash memory on board? I see the USB Pen is not plugged in.

[@vswitchzero]

This is actually a "GoTek" floppy emulator. You can store many floppy images on a single USB stick and switch between them. Very handy to have with retro DOS systems!

[@john_ace]

UMC was also a prolific producer of Gate-Arrays and small scale ASICs in the 80s and early 90s.

[@lemagreengreen]

Just a little thing but that Intel DX4 in the opening shot with the logo off-centre is interesting, never seen one like that before. Assume it isn't a mis-print but it sure looks like it!

[@vswitchzero]

Indeed! It’s an oddity for sure. I got that one out of an industrial system a few years back. Never seen another like it 🙂

[@Ale.K7]

Great chip, great video!

[@kultur-vultur]

Hey I like the use of GB cart cases to hold CPU's, gonna have to use a few myself now.

[@foxdavion6865]

UMC x486 models ended up being rarely on the market in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Europe and the UK; For every 100 or so Intel or AMD chips, you'd come across one of these, very rare and were just floating around the place. How they ended up in these markets is a mystery because the only places they were common were Southeast Asia and Korea.

[@JeremyLevi]

I mean I can't speak for the other countries but here in Canada we had plenty of little Chinese / Taiwanese local hole-in-the-wall PC builder shops. I don't think it's a huge leap to assume that's probably who imported them to use in their builds.

[@foxdavion6865]

@@JeremyLevi Ah, makes a lot of sense to me.

[@technik87]

Yep, I still have this UMC Green PLC ;-)

[@3beltwesty]

We leased a pre pubic release beta 486 computer at a consulting firm. Its lease was about 1100 per month over say a year plus. It could do 3 different "passes" of Magnetic Recording Head modeling in say 12 hours; while our 386 took a day for One pass. OK by pass I mean just one set of parameters modeling the recording gap of a head for a 2.5 inch disc drive or a 3.5 drive. ei and turn the crank. 2 passes meant one varied ONE of the input variables. The darn cpu on the 486 ran hot as blazes since always doing the math modeling. So we ended up making a bigger heat sink and several fans so the thing would not lock up. The lease price of a grand a month was just for the 486 computer; not the software. That was say 1989 prices so righteous bucks

[@cpufpu]

how much time and memories...Jan Steunebrink sent me a beta to test UMC DX2.

[@mtm84a]

I'm just here admiring the use of gameboy cart cases to hold these chips

[@a120068020]

I love the 486 collection!

[@Nine-Signs]

30 years of advancing PC's and gaming, yet the 486 era was still the most fun I ever had, the most novelty I ever felt.

[@vswitchzero]

Agreed! 😁

[@paulmcgrath2175]

I still have my dx50 cpu. It was the first pc I bought new and cost me $3500.

[@BalancedSpirit79]

What an interesting little chip. Imagine if it was quad clocked and had an FPU.

[@milescarter7803]

Power savings in this era is hilarious. We had 60w incandescent light bulbs back then.

[@baladi921]

I remember rocking a 486DX 100 in the 90s

[@Mr_Meowingtons]

Would have been sweet if they had came out with a dx2 or a dx4

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

They worked on a DX2, but it never went past engineering samples.

[@JadigertheReal]

My first cpu was the cryix Dx2 66! Then AMD DX4 100 and 5x86@160 mhz. 486er times was very cool.

[@Cleatus46]

In the '90's, I replaced the motherboard 15ns SRAM with Cypress Semiconductor Corporation 10ns SRAM and the DX2-66 ran perfectly at 90Mhz.....try it.

[@xrysf03]

I recall booting Linux on a miniature embedded x86 motherboard, where the CPU would identify itself as UMC. Must've been during the noughties. Not sure if this could be an early VIA/SiS, rather I'm inclined to believe that this was something of the DM&P pedigree, i.e. and early Vortex86, a direct predecessor to Vortex86SX. Could it be that the modern Vortex chips inherit some history from the UMC 486 ? Perhaps by now there have been too many generations for any heritage to even matter, at the level of CPU core design... And yes the modern Vortex CPU's do feel like a very fast yet very lean 486DX+ (with CMPXCHG added). I believe around Vortex86DX the CPU was claimed to be "fully static", i.e. you could stop the clock for an indefinite time interval, and restart it and all the code would keep ticking (no data would get lost) - and it could be deeply underclocked, if you had to run stupid software that would not tolerate a CPU that's just too fast. Like down to 1/8th or even 1/16th. (A feature of the platform, accessible programmatically via some chipset registers, also available in the BIOS Setup on the motherboards by ICOP.)

[@yugbe]

I remember thinking I was so great in 1996 with a dx4-100 in a laptop. Ah the good days of the wild west.

[@NaoPb]

But will it run the Windows XP that's been modded for 486 cpu's?

[@vswitchzero]

Would be really interesting to try! 🙂

[@jbaroli]

I had no clue that there is a WinXP version modded for 486

[@andrasszabo7386]

Where can I find XP for 486?