Pin-compatible Upgrades
Intel later offered a modified version of its 80486DX in 80386 packaging, branded as the Intel RapidCAD. This provided an upgrade path for users with 80386-compatible hardware. The upgrade was a pair of chips that replaced both the 80386 and 80387. Since the 80486DX design contained an FPU, the chip that replaced the 80386 contained the floating point functionality, and the chip that replaced the 80387 served very little purpose. However, the latter chip was necessary in order to provide the FERR signal to the mainboard and appear to function as a normal floating point unit. The CAD branding referred to the ease of upgrading existing OEM designs from 386 to 486 CPUs with rapid turn-around in the CAD room.
Third parties offered a wide range of upgrades, for both SX and DX systems. The most popular ones were based on the Cyrix 486DLC/SLC core, which typically offered a substantial speed improvement due to its more efficient instruction pipeline and internal L1 SRAM cache. The cache was usually 1 kB, or sometimes 8 kB in the TI variant. Some of these upgrade chips (such as the 486DRx2/SRx2) were marketed by Cyrix themselves, but they were more commonly found in kits offered by upgrade specialists such as Kingston, Evergreen and Improve-It Technologies. Some of the fastest CPU upgrade modules featured the IBM SLC/DLC family (notable for its 16 kB L1 cache), or even the Intel 486 itself. Many 386 upgrade kits were advertised as being simple drop-in replacements, but often required complicated software to control the cache and/or clock doubling. Part of the problem was that on most 386 motherboards, the A20 line was controlled entirely by the motherboard with the CPU being unaware, which caused problems on CPUs with internal caches.
Overall it was very difficult to configure upgrades to produce the results advertised on the packaging, and upgrades were often less than 100% stable and/or less than 100% compatible.
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