These things often come home in a roundabout way, and late on Friday news came through from Tandon Corp in Moorpark, California that it had just launched its breakthrough 80486 machine in Europe: the 486-sl has 25MHz CPU and starts at under $5,000 with 110Mb disk drive – that implies UKP3,000 in the UK and the company puts the keen pricing down to use of its MIAT chip set which has integrated memory management functions, enabling the product to be manufactured in a slimline form; a proprietary PowerPoster circuit accepts 32-bit writes from the CPU at zero wait states, freeing the processor to execute other instructions, while also supporting pipeline writes to the MIAT chip set; it will hit the US next quarter.
