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It might not have been economically viable. The pace of obsolescence at that point in time was so fast that it might have been cheaper, over the course of two or three years, to just buy a whole new system than to retrofit a Pentium to a 386 mainboard.

Consider what else happened in the 386 through Pentium transition:

* The PCI bus became standard; your peripheral cards all needed to change.

* SDRAM became standard; the memory bus became significantly wider / faster, and you bottlenecked on RAM if you used older mainboards.

* IDE, while it was already used for hard drives, was now used for your CD drive too - you probably wanted a CD drive and not a second floppy drive (different controller) in your machine, which was harder if you only had a primary IDE bus.



And cache RAM moved on-chip.


...thus being much, much faster than any onboard cache, presumably. In such a configuration, benchmarks with and without onboard cache would be fun.




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