eBay auction of an Intel RapidCAD system

[Simmayor]

Have a look,

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2728520378&category=3674

Very interesting!

[fRaSsL]

Dohh!

[Simmayor]

What??

You wanted it all for yourself??

Simmayor

[fRaSsL]

If anyone isn't clever enough to find it themself...

The board description is not correct. This board is not an Intel motherboard. And these are ordinary Simm's. Nevertheless... have fun rising the price

[Trogdor]

Simmayor:

I did a couple of searches with Google and found this website:

http://www.funet.fi/pub/doc/hardware/ix86/Processor_Performance_Comparison

It is a newsgroup post (I think) that was written March 10, 1993. In it you will find this text:

The Intel RapidCAD is, in rough terms, an Intel 486DX with the 8 kB on-chip cache removed and a 386 pinout. To software, it appears to be a 386DX with a math coprocessor, as the 486-specific instructions have been removed from its instruction set. It is marketed by Intel as "the ultimate coprocessor" and, as the name implies, its main purpose is to replace the 386DX in existing systems and thereby boost the performance of floating-point intensive applications such as CAD software, spreadsheets, and math packages (e.g. SPSS, Mathematica).

RapidCAD is delivered as a set of two chips. RapidCAD-1 is a 132-pin PGA (pin grid array) chip that goes into the CPU socket and replaces the 386DX. It contains the CPU and the FPU (floating-point unit). RapidCAD-2 is a 68-pin PGA chip that goes into the 387 coprocessor (or EMC) socket; it contains a simple PLA whose only purpose it to generate the FERR signal for the motherboard logic: this provides full PC-compatible handling of floating point exceptions. Many CPU instructions execute in one clock cycle in the RapidCAD, just as on the Intel 486. The RapidCAD is constrained, however, by use of the standard 386DX bus interface, since every bus cycle takes two CPU clock cycles. This means that instructions may be executed by the RapidCAD faster than they can be fetched from memory. But as most FPU instructions take longer to execute than CPU instructions, they are not greatly slowed down by this slow bus interface, and most of them execute in the same time as in the Intel 486DX. Therefore, the Intel RapidCAD provides higher overall floating-point performance than any existing 386/387 combination. Results from the SPEC benchmarks, a common workstation UNIX benchmark suite, show that the RapidCAD provides 85% more floating point and 15% more integer performance than an Intel 386DX/387DX combination at the same clock frequency.

Power consumption of the RapidCAD is typically 3500 mW at 33 MHz. The current street price of the 33 MHz version is ~300 US$.


fRaSsL:
Correct me if I am wrong, but the picture appears to be a standard 386 baby AT motherboard with 6 16-bit ISA slots and 8 30-pin SIMM slots, 4 populated. Other than that the picture is quite small. How do you know that it is not an Intel manufactured board (just out of curiosity, since I have no clue)? As for the dual CPUs part of the listing title, anyone with half a brain who read the above description of the RapidCAD system will know that that is inaccurate.

Simmayor:
I don't know about the rarity of the RapidCAD CPU system since I have previously never heard of it (which is not suprising), but I can tell you that there have been no RapidCADs in the past month on eBay. As for the seller's price, I seriously doubt that anyone would have bought it at $250 USD buy-it-now (only an idiot would). The $10 starting bid I think is quite good. Personally I think the RapidCAD CPU system is extremely cool, and if I wasn't saving my money for a new computer, I'd go into an all-out bidding war with you for this item.

Gennadiy:
If you happen to be reading this post, and you know where I can purchase the RapidCAD 1 and 2 chips, please let me know.

All others: See comment for Gennadiy.

[gshv]

No, I don't know where to get RapidCad processor set. I found two RapidCAD-1 processors by accident a few weeks ago, and one of them I sold on eBay.

Gennadiy

[Trogdor]

Simmayor:

I think I will bid on it. Sorry. Have fun topping my bid

[Vlad The Impaler]

The last full set of Rapid Cad CPUs that I remember on Ebay went for well over $100 if I remember rightly. The best way to get a set is 99% luck and 1% err.... luck! I swopped a rare Cyrix 586-120 and a not quite so rare K6/2-300AFR-66 CPU for a set with a nice chap in Argentina not so long ago.

[Trogdor]

Mr. Tepes (i.e. Vlad The Impaler):

Yeah, I'm not about to pay that much. Good luck to whoever wins it. And if for some insane reason I win it with the bid I placed, then woo-hoo! I've got a RapidCAD system!

Still, even at the price Vlad mentioned, the seller's $250 buy-it-now is quite expensive in my opinion.

[Trogdor]

All:

I contacted the seller and asked for some higher resolution pictures. He sent me 8, but most of them were blurry and/or had bad lighting. 3 of them were actually usefull, I put them and thumbnails on my file storage server.

Here are the thumbnails for the pictures:







***UPDATE: I do believe I have fixed any problems with the transfer usage of my file storage server. Everything should be just fine now, and I don't know why I didn't just set it up this way to begin with.***

Each thumbnail is linked to the actual picture, each of which being about 210KB. Be advised that I only get 5MB daily transfer bandwidth on my file storage server.

Also, the seller sent me the following information:

[gshv]

[fRaSsL]

With the posting of the link here, it doesn't make sense to bid on it. And I will never understand why people are bidding days before the ending of the aution... Senseless... You're only rising the price. Clever bidding man! Argh...

[Trogdor]

fRaSsL:

You're absolutely right, it doesn't make much sense to bid that early. But I have my reasons...

[Corsairks]

[img]Hello there, its me, the guy with the RapidCAD.
First off for Brian, thanks for all the information you have given me about this CPU set, its all facinating!
About the motherboard, sorry I described it as an Intel board, I thought it might be because of the uniqueness of these CPUs, not knowing they fit standard 386 slots. My old dependable Packard Bell back in the 386 days was a 80386-16 that was soldered onto the board. (Mine even had a TURBO mode, which it was always run in...16 vs 8 mhz! -Ive got more on my PDA now.)
The reason for that high Buy-It-Now price is because I thought someone just might need this particular peice of hardware to fix a broken mission critical CAD Legacy system, you never know. Plus, even though I never expected to get anywhere near that much for it, just the "Buy It Now" icons draw more eyes in.
And I put Dual because Coprocessor was too long for the title block and not many people search for that anyway.
And lighting in my house sucks, next week I'll take some new pics. Anyone interested can email me at Corsair@sbcglobal.net, and I'll send you more, ive taken some new this morning.

No bad intentions here, just moving overseas soon, and trying to get rid of old stuff and get more cash for down payment on a new truck.

-George

[Trogdor]

All:
The seller just sent me 6 more pictures, and all of them were of nice quality. I replaced the thumbnails in my previous post with 3 of these, as well as the link addresses. Again, the full size pictures are around 210KB, except for the picture of the RapidCAD-2 chip, which is 133KB. The previous image addresses still work.

Corsairks:
Thank you for the new set of pictures. I don't believe I need any more; the ones you have sent me will do just fine.