Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[sgolds]

chipguy, I agree - the 386 was a very nice CISC design and built Intel into what it is today. Why do people think it was slow?

Simple. Operating systems at that time ran it is 8086 and 80286 emulation. It ran 286 software slower than an equivalently clocked 286 processor. Running real mode (8086) on it was a bad joke. 286 protected mode was lame.

The early 386 suffered from IBM's success with selling the IBM-AT to the world. It had to overcome a huge installed base before true 32-bit software would be readied for it.

However, some of us understood.

(That lesson doesn't apply to Itanium now, though, IMHO. That is a totally different situation because I am unconvinced that EPIC is the right direction for processors. I think that Itanium has more than legacy installations to overcome, it has to overcome its large instruction size. This means that it has an oversized execution path and always is burdened with needing to flow more memory into the execution units when compared to other architectures.)