Intel 80486 - Improvements

Improvements

The instruction set of the i486 is very similar to its predecessor, the Intel 80386, with the addition of only a few extra instructions, such as CMPXCHG which executes the compare-and-swap atomic operation and the XADD which executes the fetch-and-add atomic operation returning the original value, unlike the ADD instruction that only returned some flags.

From a performance point of view, the architecture of the i486 is a vast improvement over the 80386. It has an on-chip unified instruction and data cache, an on-chip floating-point unit (FPU), except in the SX and SL models, and an enhanced bus interface unit. Simple instructions (such as ALU reg, reg) execute in one clock cycle. These improvements yield a rough doubling in ALU performance over the 386 at the same clock rate. A 16-MHz 486 therefore has a performance similar to a 33-MHz 386, and the older design has to reach 50 MHz to be comparable with a 25-MHz 486 part.

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