Talk:Intel DX4

I read somewhere that Intel also produced a rare DX4-120MHz processor. Can anyone confirm?

Very unlikely, Crusade. Intel were firmly wedded to their 33MHz bus. They had burned their fingers with the notoriously troublesome 486DX-50 prior to this, and were determined to do nothing too sexy in 486 space by this time, lest they take the gloss of their brand-new (and very expensive) Pentium-66 - which was only marginally faster than a 486DX/4-100. A DX/4-120 would have been a very silly move for Intel. AMD made one, of course, as did Cyrix, but that was pretty much a paper product, as they had their 5x86 happening by that time. Only AMD made 486DX/4-120s in commercial quantities - largely because Intel and Cyrix both had new, bigger chips ready and AMD's K5 was running very late till the K5 arived. It helped keep them afloat. Tannin

I just read that a handful of the very last Intel 486s produced were marked as 120. Maybe for OEMs to stave off an order from AMD? Rare oddball one-off parts that nobody has heard of sometimes exist, like the AMD DX4-90. I know what you're saying about Intel & Pentiums.

Yes! I can confirm such a thing existed - my first PC had a 486DX 120Mhz CPU! I bought it here in the UK (second hand, at a computer fair) if that is of any help. Actually, re-reading through the posts above, I can't be 100% certain it wasn't an AMD or Cyrix... but I'm fairly sure it was an Intel... (And for nostalgia's sake.... it had 8mb of RAM, and a 500mb hard drive) pomegranate 21:44, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)

I've had a pretty good look around and all I can find reference to is the AMD 486DX4/120s. I don't think Intel produced any publicly available 120s. There might have been a paper idea for it, but as previously mentioned they already had bigger and better fish to fry. Pomegranite: Don't forget that AMDs were called 486DX4s whilst Intels were 80486DX4s. Easy to confuse them! Dancraggs 10:43, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

If you increased the bus speed from 33 MHz to 40 MHz, a DX4-100 would run at 120 MHz, if I'm not mistaken. As for stability, YMMV. 205.234.47.97 (talk) 08:41, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Name of the chip

The name of the chip was NOT 486DX4. It was just "DX4".

So this article should be renamed to "DX4" instead of 486DX4.

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Hkultala (talk) 15:12, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

486DX4=low end Pentium?

I seem to remember reading that the 486DX4 was at least as fast as the original 60MHz Pentiums. Can anyone confirm this? I tried Google but couldn't find anything173.60.95.232 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 16:24, 22 June 2011 (UTC).

On old code which was not optimized for Pentium's dual pipelines, and which did not use FPU, high-clocked 486-based chips could beat low-clocked pentiums. But on Pentium-optimized or FPU code, DX4 had no chance against any Pentiums. --Hkultala (talk) 15:43, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

DX3

I removed the incorrect reference to the "DX3". There never was such an animal by that name, proposed or otherwise. 2.5x 486 chips proposed were Overdrives, never to bear a "DX" moniker. The few sources about this (and the link shown) are dubious at best. DX4 was a trademark, referring to the "DX" tag Intel used for its high end chips, and "4" for the 4th generation, or 486. The 2 in "486 DX2" meant double, but that was pre-trademark legal issues. The DX4 is called just the DX4, no 486. It doesn't refer to the multiplier, as the DX4 was clock tripled. The DX3 would make even less sense. There never was a planned "DX3" at "2.5x" - and all references to this are pure conjecture.

The talk section of the actual 486 article has details on this in-depth. But long and short, there was the clock doubled "80486 DX/2", and then the clock-tripled "Intel DX4". The name "DX3" was never used, allocated, or reserved - as the caption on the linked reference photo conjects. Industry press articles at the time referred to the new naming scheme of "DX4" due to trademark issues. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.100.52.196 (talk) 22:05, 18 June 2013 (UTC)