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486 ALU stuff is mostly 1 cycles as well (other than shifts, MUL and DIV, and all the weird stuff like AAD), as well as stores and loads. Taken conditional jumps are 3 cycles, non-taken 1 cycle, so loop unrolling helps a lot on 486.

You can approach 0.8 IPC on 486, assuming you know about AGI stalls and other quirks.

General 486-era C-compiler produced code, though, would be lucky to hit 0.4 IPC.




I was taking intel's 80486 promo materials at face value. Plus 486 ALU may be 1-cycle but loads and stores are not 2-cycle like they are for C-M0 so it'll still lose :)


At least this page says 486 stores and loads are 1 cycle: https://zsmith.co/intel_m.php#mov

But it's been over 25 years since I last wrote asm for a 486 CPU.




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