The Blue Lightning CPU is an interesting beast. There is not a whole lot of information about what the processor really is, but it can be pieced together from various scraps of information. Around 1990, IBM needed low-power 32-bit processors with good performance for its portable systems, but no one offered such CPUs yet. IBM licensed the 386SX core from Intel and turned it into the IBM 386SLC processor (SLC reportedly stood for “Super Little Chip”).
Fascinating footnote in processor history.
Anyone else getting a 403 error from the linked article?
Funnily enough, I can access the page just fine using a free Web proxy with a US IP address. Accessing the site directly gives a 403 error every time.
Seems to work just fine.
– Gilboa
No, I’m getting a “486: These are not the chips you are looking for” error.
My first PC was a Colosus (IBM manufactured) and featured a IBM BL2 25/50MHz (switchable in BIOS), a jumperless soundblaster card and was pretty awesome. I think the BIOS handled most of the config – this is back before plug and play and jumperless configuration was common (circa 1993.) It came with Windows 3.1 and PC DOS 7. It was very well supported. However, when Windows 95 was released, I quickly realized that it hated the sound card, as it was not “plug and play”.
Never realized what the BL stood for! I’m also now wondering if it was actually a 486, as the chip was supposedly compatible – but the model name sort of suggests somthing else
Edited 2017-11-21 13:04 UTC
There were two chip designs marketed as Blue Lightning. The first was a 386 derivative with tiny cache and power saving functions. The second was Cyrix’s 486 clone manufactured by IBM with the IBM logo placed on top. Both were very good values for their time.
From what I found on google, the BL2 was the clock doubled (hence 25/50 switch) version of the 486 design, but was pin compatible with the 386. I think my chip must have been this one (from Wikipedia):
IBM 486DLC2 (486BLX2).
The BL2, I think, comes from the name in alternate name brackets. This chip is apparently not the Cyrix chip at all, but something weird licensed from Intel. Finding any info on the Web is hard though.
I remember the IBM Blue Lightning. I was living in Toronto at the time in a house with a couple of others. One of the residents was a Bulgarian engineer (Plaamen) who had a chip burner. He was tripling the speed on the SLC 25MHz chips to take them to 75MHz.
Going to vogons wiki and vcfed.org reveals a lot more than…
“There is not a whole lot of information about what the processor really is”
A lot is known about them, you just have to search for it, in the right places. Lots of vintage computer hobbyists have done tests on these chips, and there might be more information in the hands of those same vintage computer hobbyists.