IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386?

The OS/2 Museum has a vintage Alaris Cougar board, manufactured by IBM for Alaris. The board features a DLC3 processor, also known as Blue Lightning, with a small IBM DLC3 processor and a Socket 2 for regular 486DX/SX processors or a Pentium OverDrive. If a ceramic-packaged 486 or OverDrive processor is installed, the on-board DLC3 is disabled. The processor does not have a built-in coprocessor, but can use a regular 387 coprocessor. The DLC3 performance varies depending on its use, but it generally achieved 486-class performance. The Blue Lightning processor was designed to solve the problem of low-power 32-bit processors with good performance. The processor runs at up to 100MHz and has a 16KB write-back L1 cache, which impacts its performance. The Blue Lightning processors were used in some IBM desktops and ThinkPads. The SLC/DLC processors are not to be confused with IBM’s later 486DX/DX2/DX4 processors, which were built under a license from Cyrix. The Blue Lightning design was able to run the processors at frequencies almost ten times faster than the initial 386s, while keeping power

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/ibm-blue-lightning-worlds-fastest-386/comment-page-1/

To top