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Category Archives: Intel
XMVM Surgery
Last week I was prompted to take a look at the Intel Code Builder compiler from 1991, a 32-bit compiler targeting 386 extended DOS and shipping with its own DOS extender. It is what one might call an extremely obscure … Continue reading
Posted in 386, Development, Intel, PC history, Software Hacks
10 Comments
The IBM PC, 41 Years Ago
No, the OS/2 Museum does not have either a time machine or difficulty doing basic math. As of this writing, it is August 2021 and the IBM PC was announced in August 1981, 40 years ago. But in August 1980, … Continue reading
Posted in 8086/8088, BIOS, DOS, IBM, Intel, PC hardware, PC history
60 Comments
Nobody Expects…
…the Spanish Inquisition! Well, that too, but also nobody expects that a bland, run-of-the mill Novell NE2000 NDIS driver would crash/hang just because it runs on 486 or later CPUs. I wanted to try the “basic” DOS redirector shipped with … Continue reading
Posted in 486, Bugs, Intel, Microsoft
6 Comments
8237A DMA Page Fun
The other day I was trying to fill a couple of gaps in my understanding of the Intel 8237A DMA controller documentation. I wrote a small testcase that performed a dummy transfer and modified the base address and count registers … Continue reading
Posted in Intel, PC architecture, PC history
3 Comments
Nehalem and 4 Gbit DDR3
While discussing Intel desktops with DDR2 memory using 2 Gbit technology (4 GB UDIMMs), the question of Intel’s next generation and 4 Gbit DDR3 (8 GB UDIMMs) came up. It’s more or less the next iteration of exactly the same … Continue reading
Posted in Intel, PC hardware, PC history
8 Comments
The Phantom Intel GM47 Chipset
I spent a bit of time recently putting together technical documentation for Intel’s 4-series chipsets, partly motivated by research into Intel’s support of 4 GB DDR2 memory modules, partly driven by idle curiosity about one of Intel’s many hyped up … Continue reading
Posted in Intel, PC history, PC press
7 Comments
Seek and Ye Shall Find…
…in the strangest places! Lately I’ve been digging up marketing materials related to Intel’s desktop boards (I’ve long been toying with the idea of writing up a brief history of the circa 10 years of Intel Extreme Series boards). There … Continue reading
Posted in Archiving, Intel, PC hardware, PC history
2 Comments
Return to Stormville
A while ago I griped about a strangely ill-behaved Intel DX79SR Stormville board. To recap, the board simply refused to take any memory in the 4th memory channel. Since then, there have been very interesting new development in the story. … Continue reading
Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware
3 Comments
How Old Is OMF?
The Object Module Format (OMF), used by most DOS development tools, and eventually displaced by COFF/ELF in the 32-bit world, is quite old. It is a somewhat strange format because of its age, and it is quite complex, both because … Continue reading
Posted in Development, Intel, Microsoft, PC history, x86
8 Comments
Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines…
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at … Continue reading
Posted in AMD, Bugs, Intel, Microsoft
24 Comments