appiah4 wrote on 2022-11-01, 12:12:
Kahenraz wrote on 2022-11-01, 00:05:
I always thought that the DX was more interesting. I always found floating point arithmetic to be useful, unless all you needed was business software.
My first gaming PC was a DX-33 and I had really insisted on getting the DX vs the SX at the time (this must be around 1993). In hindsight, my dad should have said no and bought the SX-33.. I don't recall playing a single game other than Ocean/DID's Inferno that actually leveraged the FPU, and even then that game was pretty crap. By the time such games were more common we had upgraded to a DX4-100. Ultimately we paid a premium for something we never used.
True, the first half of the 90s there was little reason for average PC users to need a DX. Whereas those who had been familiar with the 386SX deficit of external addressing and general lack of cache implementation, making it slower in integer than the 386DX may have thought the 486SX was more like the 386SX without an FPU, rather than just the 386DX without an FPU (Which was additional anyway on a 386es) Therefor Intel may have nobbled their 486SX sales by the expectations set by the 386SX, but it didn't do them any harm if people were buying the DX instead. Unless they ended up with far more FPU broke dies they couldn't sell at all than let on... which may line up with later market dumping.
Myself around this time, earlier 90s, I had been playing around with "cheap junk" XT class, as a young adult without much money of my own, the 486es of all stripes were still eyewatering prices, I just wanted something that ran DOS 6.x and Windows 3.1 okay, so first "modern" hardware buy was one of those 386SX40 baby boards, which everyone had said was "about as quick" as the lowest end 486SX which was still out of reach. By 1995, prices were dropping a lot and there were a lot of things that demanded performance above that, so this time it was Pentium class that was eyewateringly out of reach, so I got a BEK 486 board and a Cyrix 5x86.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
