80486/5x86 Die Photography

The Intel 80486 is a higher performance follow-up to the Intel 80386 microprocessor. Introduced in 1989, it is the first tightly pipelined x86 design as well as the first x86 chip to use more than a million transistors, due to a large on-chip cache and an integrated floating-point unit. It represents a fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs since the original 8086 of 1978.

A 50 MHz 80486 executes around 40 million instructions per second on average and is able to reach 50 MIPS peak performance.

The i486 does not have the usual 80-prefix because of a court ruling that prohibits trademarking numbers (such as 80486). Later, with the introduction of the Pentium brand, Intel began branding its chips with words rather than numbers.

CPUs based on the Cyrix 486 design.

All die pictures were taken by Pauli Rautakorpi and are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Slightly edited by HARDWARECOP (exposure adjustments).

*Please note that pre-released die photos might have a less good quality compared to an officially released die photo.