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Comment by signaru | Hacker News Reader

I occasionally wonder if a limited 386/486 architecture would get an advantage over current mini Atom x86 boards (e.g. Latte Panda). Would it have a smaller foot print and power requirement? Or is the economics just making it not worth it?

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Intel tried this with the Quark core, which was discontinued in 2019:

Compare the Quark Core Block Diagram: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/pr...

with that of the 486 (Figure 3-2): http://datasheets.chipdb.org/Intel/x86/486/manuals/27302101....

A lot of the Quark documentation was basically copied-pasted from the 486 one, and 486 replaced with Quark. There was some rather unusual phrasing and anachronisms as a result.

The 386 was a 1000-1500 nano meter process, and even at that scale took 1/6th of the die space used by an RTX3090 today on 8nm process.

A 386 draws almost no power, much less than an Atom. At the end of the 386's market life, which I should point out ran for 22 years, it was being used in handheld devices that ran off 1 alkaline battery for months at a time, and those had radios in them.

Obviously you get more bang from something like an Atom but I don't think the 386 had any power saving tricks to learn from it.

Maybe this is related but by the end of its "computer life" Fujitsu was paying cash for any 386 you could get them (even used) because it was part of some network card they sold.

That's wild. I assume they wanted socketed models, not the embedded QFP-100 package that they'd have to desolder?

Correct.

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