First post, by Sosowski
Hi!
I've been wondering if it is possible to create a Socket 3 transposer that would allow a 14x14 PGA-132 386 to be plugged into a 17x17 Socket 3 486 motherboard.
I've seen ideas for solutions that go the other way round, since nobody in their sane mind would want to put a 386 on a perfectly fine 486 mobo back in the days, but I'm thinking of building an ultimate 386 machine running on a newer 486 chipset with 256MB RAM support, etc.
Wikipedia lists some SiS, Ali ,VIA , and UMC (can't fine the site) chipsets as supporting both 386 and 486 and having both a PGA-132 and a Socket-1/2/3, making me think that all of the chipsets that can be cranked to 5V would be able to support a 386 and they just lack a socket for it.
Sounding like a fun project, I am thinking of trying to design a transposer / adapter to put a 386 into Socket 3, but wanted to ask if this is viable or are there any possible pitfalls for this? I mean, Socket-3 is 168 pin, that's 34 extra pins, but most 486 CPUs don't use the outer pins anyways. I'm also wondering if the lack of on-chip cache would be a problem and if it would require slapping a SRAM chip on top of the adapter to account for it.
One way or another, I have not seen a ready solution for this and wanted to ask whether a project like that would be viable enough to give it a shot.