What you can by is a FPGU FPGA :)
Basically a lego kit for a CPU you can program for different use cases which dont warrant cpu manufacturing at scale or prototyping
It got swallowed by CPUs pretty quickly. On 386 it was a real coprocessor: the 387. On 486 it was a whole CPU that disabled the first CPU. The 487 was just a 486 with floating-point built-in.
But it still checked that you had a genuine Intel 486 installed, or it wouldn’t run. Because money.
Thank you. Didn’t know that was a thing. I never had to buy an fpu so it was just built with the cpu so I never learned what it was.
What you can by is a
FPGUFPGA :)Basically a lego kit for a CPU you can program for different use cases which dont warrant cpu manufacturing at scale or prototyping
FPGA, but close enough.
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Now I really want a lego kit of a mechanical computer. That would be so cool.
It got swallowed by CPUs pretty quickly. On 386 it was a real coprocessor: the 387. On 486 it was a whole CPU that disabled the first CPU. The 487 was just a 486 with floating-point built-in.
But it still checked that you had a genuine Intel 486 installed, or it wouldn’t run. Because money.