AMD Am486DX

Historia

The Am486 is a 80486-class processors produced by AMD in the 1990s. Intel beat AMD to market by nearly four years, but AMD priced its 40 MHz 486 at or below Intels price for a 33 MHz chip, offering about 20% better performance for the same price. Early AMD 486 chips were drop-in replacements for their Intel counterparts, but later AMD clock-doubled 486s ran at 3.3 volts instead of Intels 5 volts, which limited their suitability as upgrade chips until third-party voltage adapters appeared on the market. While the Am386 was primarily used by small computer manufacturers, the Am486DX, DX2, and SX2 chips gained acceptance among larger computer manufactuers, expecially Acer and Compaq, in the 1994 time frame. AMDs higher clocked 486 chips provided superior performance to many of the early Pentium chips, especially the 60 and 66 MHz launch products. While equivalent Intel 80486DX4 chips were priced high and required a minor socket modification, AMD priced low. Intels DX4 chips had twice the cache of the AMD chips, giving them a slight performance edge, but AMDs DX4-100 usually cost less than Intels DX2-66.