IBM Corp’s agreement with Intel Corp allows IBM to fabricate up to 20% of its requirement of 80386 family parts, and according to the Wall Street Journal, IBM has exercised its right to do its own versions of the chips by designing a version of the 80386SX with a skinny 8Kb cache integrated with the CPU on a single chip. The part, expected to be offered as a PS/2 circuit board, is said to execute some applications up to 85% faster than 80386SX CPUs without any cache. Putting the cache on chip should also make the part go faster than implementations with larger off-chip caches.
