Seeing that many manufacturers are so dissatisfied with the size of the 8Kb on-chip cache on the 80486 that they are adding their own secondary caches, Intel Corp has decided that it should try to get some of the financial benefit, and has come out with Turbocache486, a second level external cache that is claimed to improve performance up to 15%. The thing plugs into a standard socket and includes a 500,000 transistor custom cache controller – the 82485 – and static RAMs. It comes in 64Kb and 128Kb versions at either 80486 clock speed and up to four can be cascaded for a maximum of 512Kb. Sampling next month, volume in the fourth quarter, it’s UKP214 for 64Kb at 33MHz, UKP179 at 25MHz for 1,000-up.
