[geeks] The Mini-ITX box is done!

[Lionel Peterson]

> From: Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at verizon.net>
> Date: 2004/08/04 Wed PM 02:09:52 GMT
> To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
> Subject: Re: Re: [geeks] The Mini-ITX box is done!
> 
> > From: Kevin <kevin at mpcf.com>
> > Date: 2004/08/04 Wed PM 12:59:16 GMT
> > To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
> > Subject: Re: [geeks] The Mini-ITX box is done!
> > 
> > RH no longer supports 486 CPUs?  Is it because of the
> > "Enterprise" thing?
> > 
> > Let me add that to my list of complaints with RH.
> 
> Wow - I think you are looking for reasons to be mad at RH...
> 
> I suspect that RHEL requires more memory than a 486 can address, sort of forcing their hand - can you put more than 64 Meg in a conventional 80486 (avoiding odd SMP architectures)? RHEL requires 256 Meg RAM (of course, now I've just given you *another* to complain about RH. ;^) See: http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/configuration/

Turns out, you can (according to Intel) put up to 4 Gig or physical RAM on a 486DX4 CPU, see:

http://www.intel.com/design/intarch/prodbref/272712.htm

I stand corrected - of course, I doubt there was a motherboard/support chipset that would support that much RAM for an 80486 MB. I think by the time RAM got "dense enough" to put that kind of RAM on a 486, the mainstream had migrated to these "Pentium-thingies", so there may not hav ebeen any real market demand for so much memory in a 486...