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But in the end, the 386 finished ahead of schedule, an almost unheard-of accomplishment.

Does that schedule include all the revisions they did too? The first few were almost uselessly buggy:

https://www.pcjs.org/documents/manuals/intel/80386/



According to "Design and Test of the 80386", the processor was completed ahead of its 50-man-year schedule from architecture to first production units, and set an Intel record for tapeout to mask fabricator.


Except for the first stepping A0, whose list of bugs is unknown, and it also implemented a few extra instructions that were dropped in the next revisions, instead of having their bugs fixed, the other steppings have errata lists that are not significantly worse than those of most recent Intel or AMD CPUs, which also have long lists of bugs, for which there are workarounds in most cases, at the hardware level or operating system level.


That's a rabbit hole I didn't know about re: removed instructions. Thanks for that bit of trivia.

https://www.pcjs.org/documents/manuals/intel/80386/ibts_xbts...




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