Mike1978 wrote on Yesterday, 17:03:Hi again, […]
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red-ray wrote on 2026-08-09, 16:49:
Mike1978 wrote on 2026-08-07, 17:23:I can explain it the base card is an Intel Inboard 386/pc but I have running in the card a CPU interposer I-O Data PK-A486BL 386/486 Blue Lightning Processor Upgrade CPU BL3 60MHz 486DLC.
Thank you, I half guessed this could be the situation. Does the Intel Inboard 386/pc have a motherboard cache?
Some time ago I updated SIV to detect and report the 486DLC L1 cache size so I would be good if you tried SIV32L.exe and posted the screen shot and Menu->File->Save Local file so I can see how the new code does.
Hi again,
Gave this a go and got a missing msvcrt error is this a known requirement on Win 95 ? I’m recalling this from memory as it was very late when I tried it.
I’ll give it another spin after a few more installs as it maybe packaged up with the likes of MS Internet explorer 5.5 sp2 etc.. it is OSR1 and will in the future be giving osr2 another attempt.
Mike
I had to kill it it was making the box unresponsive but here's the partial file output
Edit - it got further than I thought. It looked dead so I pulled it, but the CPU sections did complete, so there is usable data in there after all.
On the 486DLC L1 cache detection you asked me to try, the new code reports:
L1 Unified Cache 4-way 16-byte 8KB
L2 Unified Cache Unknown
The Blue Lightning BL3 has 16KB, so it is reading half. My guess is it is falling back to the generic i486 default rather than probing, because CPUID is not available on this chip - [_]CPUID is clear in the [cpuid] section - but you will know far better than me whether the new detection path needs CPUID to run at all.
The clock is the part I would most like your view on:
CPU-0 Generic 486 DX2 STK 65.131MHz CPU 65.131MHz FSB 32.565MHz
CPU-0 65.1MHz x2 32.6MHz
The x2 is correct and genuinely useful to see confirmed - that is the clock multiplier I set with CTCHIP34, so it is holding. But the base reads 32.6MHz and I have a 40MHz crystal fitted, swapped up from the original 32MHz. CheckCPU and CheckIt both measure around 83.5MHz from DOS, which fits 40 x 2. SIV under Windows makes it 65, which fits the old 32MHz crystal.
So either the clock is not holding under Windows, which would be well worth me chasing as there is real performance in it, or the timing loop is struggling on this hardware. With no TSC on this chip I assume it is PIT calibrated, and this machine is awkward - the Inboard has its own local bus and speed register while the ISA side stays at 4.77MHz. How much would you trust that figure here?
Two other things you may want, since SIV is not going to meet this hardware often:
- RAM reads 8.00MB against 5MB actual, and it reports "Chips 1 SIMMs 4" plus two 4MB SPD entries. There are no SIMM sockets on this machine at all - it is 1MB on the Inboard plus a 4MB piggyback.
- Every section took 7 to 14 seconds, a couple over 20 ([features] was 21s), which is what made it look hung rather than slow. I assume that is SMBus/ACPI/PnP probing timing out against a 1983 machine.
The BIOS line came out exactly right, for what it is worth: "Unknown Motherboard BIOS C1.10 Copyright IBM Corp 1981 05/09/86" - that is the correct 09MAY86 5160 ROM.
Mike
Second edit - correcting myself on the cache, having gone through the file properly.
The 8KB is not a failed probe, it looks like it never probed at all. "486DLC" does not appear anywhere in the file, SIV classifies the chip as "Generic" throughout, and there is a line reading "CPU Tweak is Not Supported for the Generic 486 DX2 65MHz CPU". The 8KB 4-way 16-byte figure is just the stock Intel 486DX descriptor, so it would print the same whether the cache is enabled or not.
More usefully, and this is what I missed first time round - the very last line of the file is the latency section header with nothing under it. That is exactly where I killed it. So the cache latency test, the one thing that would have measured rather than classified, never ran.
What sits immediately before it explains why the machine looked dead. It was not hung at all, it was benchmarking:
benchmark-dd Integer 2, Float 2 - 106.44 seconds
benchmark-dw Integer 1, Float 2 - about 87 seconds
latency - killed here
So I pulled it roughly two minutes too early, right as the cache test was starting. That one is on me, not on SIV.
Happy to run it again and leave it completely alone this time if the latency numbers would be useful to you. Just say and I will let it run to completion however long it takes, and post the full file.
