bradley.grigor@canremote.uucp (BRADLEY GRIGOR) (07/29/90)
Douglas Baer writes:
ba>Does anyone know about the extent to which machines based on the
ba>intel 386sx chip will be compatible with OS/2 2.0? I understand that
ba>the sx has the full 32-bit instruction set of the dx chip, but has
ba>memory addressing limitations (16-bit path, etc.). A salesperson
ba>trying to push a DX over an SX told me that the memory addressing
ba>limitations meant that many 32-bit applications (unless they were
ba>specifically programmed around the limitations of the SX chip),
ba>including OS/2 2.0, would not run on an SX machine. Is this claim
ba>garbage, as I suspect, or is there something to it?
I think it is garbage. The 16-bit aspect of the SX lies only in
the memory access width, i.e. it fetches memory 16 bits at a time
and therefore has half the theoretical memory access performance
of a chip that fetches 32-bits at a time. Apart from that, and
especially in terms of how a program sees them, an SX is the same
as a DX.
...bag bradley.grigor@canremote.uucp Newmarket, Ontario, Canada
---