All right, I will take your word for it. When did it come out, though?
I think EDO RAM didn't start to appear until the early/mid 1990s -- 1993/1994 or so at the earliest. This was very late in the lifespan of 486 chips (and enhanced ones like 586s) and so this would have been a small performance tweak for very low-end budget hardware, surely?
> Early Intel Pentium chipsets included additional chips performing that buffering between system and ram (for example 82438VX).
Hang on. The 430VX was not an early Pentium chipset. It was a late one.
The dominant early Intel chipset for Pentium hardware was the 430NX "Neptune". I had a Neptune-based PC at work, originally with a Pentium 66 in it, later replaced with a PODP, the Pentium Overdrive, with a clock-doubled 3.3V P54 chip in a socket adaptor.
Neptune was nothing special and had no performance boosts to speak of. The only interesting thing is that as it didn't have built-in EIDE, it was often on a PCI card. I removed it from my all-SCSI machine for a "purer" setup with nothing using the EIDE I/O ports and DMA channels.
Triton (430FX) brought in EDO support, and was as I said about 15% faster with all other factors being equal: same CPU, same cache, same drives, same graphics, etc.
This is the time period when I developed the 32-bit version of PC Pro magazine's 16-bit Windows benchmark. I was very familiar with PC performance and components back then.
The DosDays website is confusing because it lists the chipsets in this order:
NX "Neptune"
FX "Triton"
HX "Triton II"
TX "Triton IV"
VX "Triton III"
... when its own dates show that the TX came later, and it really went:
NX
FX
HX/VX more or less simultaneously and both termed Triton II
TX <- I don't think I ever saw this
I strongly disagree with your comment about cache.
Cache/no cache was huge. Write-back vs write-through was huge. Pipelined burst cache helped a lot but any L2 cache was good.
No, the type of cache wasn't a big difference: having it at all was what mattered. Cheap cloners had no L2 cache and modified the startup messages to say "writeback cache" meaning that only L1 cache was present.
Aside from bargain-basement skipware, most Pentium boxes that were any good had Intel chipsets and L2 cache. Usually only enough for caching the first 64MB.
late, and only in 4th revision of this particular chipset :) Its the exception to the rule.
>Hang on. The 430VX was not an early Pentium chipset. It was a late one. After the "Triton", the 430FX:
FX had similar buffers - 82438FX
> early Intel chipset for Pentium hardware was the 430NX "Neptune"
2x 82433NX LBX "data path between the host CPU/Cache and main memory", no mention of FPM/EDO in datasheet and only goes down to standard FPM X-3-3-3 timings. Afaik still works with EDO just with no speed difference.
>I strongly disagree with your comment about cache. Cache/no cache was huge.
Only on chipsets not supporting faster EDO timings. No L2 is not a big deal with EDO because EDO timings are already almost as fast as Async L2 cache (7-2-2-2 vs 3-2-2-2). No L2+EDO https://dependency-injection.com/intel-430fx-triton-l2-cache... 2% slower in Doom but 8% faster in Quake. Comparison between Async L2 + FPM vs no L2 + EDO would look even better for EDO.
PB cache on the other hand was an easy 10-20% bump over Async L2.
I literally linked tests that show otherwise :) Intel datasheets explain why, PB not only allowed 3-1-1-1 cache timings but also unlocked faster ram modes.
>modified the startup messages to say "writeback cache"
Wasnt PCchips pretty much the only fraud that made boards with no L2 cache, with some other vendors (amptron, kaimei, jamicon) selling same relabeled pcchips? There was a funny case of Octek selling some models plastered with "Dynamic Cache Architecture" stickers while the cache was build into special EDRAM ram, big problem being most of those models shipped with chipset unable to support said EDRAM :) example https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/octek-hippo-vl-2
All right, I will take your word for it. When did it come out, though?
I think EDO RAM didn't start to appear until the early/mid 1990s -- 1993/1994 or so at the earliest. This was very late in the lifespan of 486 chips (and enhanced ones like 586s) and so this would have been a small performance tweak for very low-end budget hardware, surely?
> Early Intel Pentium chipsets included additional chips performing that buffering between system and ram (for example 82438VX).
Hang on. The 430VX was not an early Pentium chipset. It was a late one.
It launched in 1996: https://theretroweb.com/chipsets/277
After the "Triton", the 430FX:
https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/intel_chipsets.php
The dominant early Intel chipset for Pentium hardware was the 430NX "Neptune". I had a Neptune-based PC at work, originally with a Pentium 66 in it, later replaced with a PODP, the Pentium Overdrive, with a clock-doubled 3.3V P54 chip in a socket adaptor.
Neptune was nothing special and had no performance boosts to speak of. The only interesting thing is that as it didn't have built-in EIDE, it was often on a PCI card. I removed it from my all-SCSI machine for a "purer" setup with nothing using the EIDE I/O ports and DMA channels.
Triton (430FX) brought in EDO support, and was as I said about 15% faster with all other factors being equal: same CPU, same cache, same drives, same graphics, etc.
This is the time period when I developed the 32-bit version of PC Pro magazine's 16-bit Windows benchmark. I was very familiar with PC performance and components back then.
The DosDays website is confusing because it lists the chipsets in this order:
NX "Neptune"
FX "Triton"
HX "Triton II"
TX "Triton IV"
VX "Triton III"
... when its own dates show that the TX came later, and it really went:
NX
FX
HX/VX more or less simultaneously and both termed Triton II
TX <- I don't think I ever saw this
I strongly disagree with your comment about cache.
Cache/no cache was huge. Write-back vs write-through was huge. Pipelined burst cache helped a lot but any L2 cache was good.
No, the type of cache wasn't a big difference: having it at all was what mattered. Cheap cloners had no L2 cache and modified the startup messages to say "writeback cache" meaning that only L1 cache was present.
Aside from bargain-basement skipware, most Pentium boxes that were any good had Intel chipsets and L2 cache. Usually only enough for caching the first 64MB.