High Treason's Museum

Systems

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High Treason's Museum - Systems - Chiana \ Quick Overview

Overview

Chiana, with Lisa, as of September 2022

Throughout the 1980s, many had built exact clones of the Intel 8086 line of CPUs without really deviating from the design. There were a few small exceptions, such as NEC implementing a 186-like CPU into an 8088 package, but for now it was all Intel and certainly, all 16-Bit.

As the 1980s approached its end and world moved into the era of the 386, AMD would go on to manufacture their own version, but once more this was an identical copy of the Intel part, with the same performance and operating characteristics, being indistinguishable from the Intel part. IBM also had their name on a few 386 processors, but again, these were Intel designs. In this time, a smaller company from California had been working hard to clone numerous parts of the PC, then build compatible parts on their own designs. This company did not have their own fabrication facilities and used Toshiba or Texas Instruments to build their ICs, likely others too. Among their achievements were the first real chipsets, the 82100 and then the 82200, perhaps better known as the NEAT. In 1985 they had been the first to clone EGA and then improved upon it, and in 1987 they rapidly cloned the cutting edge VGA technology and began to expand upon it. Their products sold well and were popular, as they usually saved cost, made board production faster and performed as well as, if not better than, the original parts that might not have been available anyway.

This company was Chips & Technologies. In 1992, they released the first 'Compatible' 32-Bit x86 CPU, the Super 386 or J38600DX, as well as an accompanying FPU, the Super Math J38700DX. These chips weren't like the AMD or IBM parts and, instead, used C&T's own design which boasted a few improvements. Another CPU was planned, the J38605DX with an internal cache, but it used a larger socket and never truly made it to market.

Operating at upto 33MHz, the Super 386 came and went largely unnoticed. Its time was brief, but it had long lasting consequences. For one thing, Toshiba and Texas Instruments both had their hands in the manufacturing and the latter would show up to the inevitable court case with Intel. C&T would ultimately withdraw from the 386 market, but the legal proceedings would pave the way for Texas Instruments, or else Cyrix, to sell their own x86 CPUs throughout the 1990s. AMD would almost certainly lean on the outcome of this case when facing their own legal troubles, too.

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High Treason's Museum - Systems - Chiana / Specs

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System Performance

The improvement over the Intel CPU is marginal, but it is there and the chip seems to be efficient. Also the memory interleave is quite apparent here.

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Pictures

Chiana's cover removed. This is a low profile chassis and uses an ISA riser for expansion cards. There isn't a lot of room and things get warm due to poor airflow. Still, I rather like this design. Thankfully most components in this system don't push out much heat, with the VGA and Capture Cards being the main offenders.

There's not much room at the back, either, with every slot taken up. Attaching the BNC Ethernet cable is a bit tough and the mess of breakout leads and termination for video gets in the way of things, but overall it's nice and compact and I like it. You do have to think hard about what cards you want in here.

The ADDA ET400 Broadcast Card was designed for TV stations, somehow, and outputs S-Video, Composite, RGB and VGA signals, configurable in an application. It can be expanded with more RAM and a better RAMDAC, but we don't need that here and I don't own these accessories.

The AITech VideoSurge 24 is a capture card using mostly 1991 and 1992 technology. Instead of an analog connection, it uses the digital Feature Connector. It too had upgrade options for MJPEG and such and is, as it happens, a modified C&T design. I modified the heatsink to touch the case cover.

Overall the capture card is quite capable. However, like the VGA card it is heavy and long, so really needs these slot guides, especially as the cards tend to sag into one another without them. The fan you can see is absolutely necessary to stop them both overheating in such tight quarters.

With an SNR of over 100db, the Pro Audio Studio shows again just how much we lost when Media Vision were gone. Many modern sound cards would struggle to achieve this. Otherwise it handles like the regular PAS16 and also provides the SCSI interface used by the CD-ROM drive.

Not much can be said about the 3Com 3C509 that hasn't already been said a million times. It's an Ethernet card with the three major interfaces and it works, as the 509 usually does, quite well. There are certainly better performing cards out there, but the Etherlink III is more than good enough, 99% of the time.

With the cards removed, you still can't see much and removing the center piece is quite time consuming. Still, you can see the generic I/O card and just how tight things will be when all expansion boards are installed. You might just spot two sets of batteries, which we'll come back to shortly.

A weird connector that almost looks like NuBus is visible above the RAM, which is supposedly for further memory expansion. Near this you can see the tiny space we have to route cables through for the CD-ROM drive. This won't be helping airflow whatsoever, but again, nothing down here runs very hot.

The CPU and FPU near the 64K cache. Those unused pinholes around the CPU are interesting, as these would line up with the J38605, suggesting at one time this board might have been designed for them, especially as I suspect it to be a C&T reference design. That pretty FPU package is, I believe, from Toshiba.

A nice turbo display. It's smaller than usual and isn't a jumper ridden affair at the back. Instead, you program it with the reset switch. Curiously the counter will go up to 999, despite the display not having the digits required to display this. The value is stored by a small battery. Surely this terrified the original owner when it was suddenly showing 0 one day.

You can click the above pictures to see full size versions in a new window

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System Achievements

Chiana holds a few records:

• Most 'exotic' system in the collection - very rare CPU

• Oldest capture card in the collection

• Least noisy sound card I have

• Slowest CPU to play Dark Forces to completion - because I wanted to

Ooh-laa!!!

Videos Available

Chiana appeared in a video that goes into more detail than this article realistically can (this site is hosted on a slower system than Chiana) and you get to see more of that gorgeous FPU package.

Video for Windows v1.1