No contest really: RISCV is a much better ISA, VexRISC is a hyper-optimised implementation of it (for FPGAs), and it's not hindered by trying to be microcode compatible.
The roughly equivalent VexRISC configuration (full with MMU) is only 2736 LUTs, running at 124 Mhz (on Cyclone V, which I'm pretty sure is the same arch)
Question:
Are there today any 386 instances running somewhere in the basement to do some productive stuff, maybe processing only some controller data once a day?
I remember the link some month ago where that one small shop ran completely on an old Amiga (?IIRC, not sure, was linked here)
Around 98/99 I was involved in a small IT-management company serving SME around the region, we had a client producing distinct metal objects with a big press; this got feeded once a day with a 5.25 floppy from another machine with production data - and it was still in use while we had already ethernet/USB/3.5 floppies etc. :-D
I wonder how many of those are actually still out there. According to Wikipedia, Intel kept making replacement parts (386 and 486) until September 2007, but personally, I have never come across one in actual use. My own career in this field began with an internship in 2008. My day job includes working on a PLC runtime with a code base older than myself, originally written for DOS, but every industrial PC (or other x86 based embedded device) I have ever got to play around with had at the very least a Pentium class CPU in it.
As for the Windows 3.x based industrial equipment: Some industrial devices I have worked on in the past turned out to actually be ARM based, running Linux, but the software went a long way to convincingly fake old Windows style UI or emulate a DOS prompt. I was once tasked to extend such a UI library to faithfully reproduce Windows 98 style color gradient borders.
Only once have I seen an actual embedded 486SX with my own eyes, but not in active use anymore. Last year, someone dragged a dusty, old, weirdo Siemens telephony box to the the local Hackerspace. The box itself had a design language that screamed "Star Trek: Voyager". I found a UART, it was running "On Time RTOS-32" which, according to the German Wikipedia, was an RTOS with a Windows API compatible userspace, developed by a German company in 1996 and discontinued in 2023.
> Some industrial devices I have worked on in the past turned out to actually be ARM based, running Linux, but the software went a long way to convincingly fake old Windows style UI or emulate a DOS prompt. I was once tasked to extend such a UI library to faithfully reproduce Windows 98 style color gradient borders.
IBM mainframes have an embedded PC (the "Support Element") used to manage the hardware configuration and diagnostics. Originally, it ran OS/2. In 2005, IBM replaced it with Linux–running a UI which looked like OS/2. (At some point more recently, they refreshed the visual look so it doesn't look like OS/2 any more, although I'm not sure when they did that.)
A few years ago there was a story where the single Amiga that ran an entire US school district's HVAC was replaced with a system costing like 1.5 million dollars, after 30 years of dutiful service.
I can't think of examples offhand but you bet your ass there are donut shops and auto body repair services running 386s to do POS, inventory, and the like. Some of them may be driving terminals off Xenix.
Funny thing about this is that the character-based systems of that era, whether PC-type or host+terminal type, were most of the time so much faster and more responsive than the laggy, over-animated, touchscreen trash they always replace them with in order to get big screens and prettier graphics.
The Amiga was not character-based, it ran an accelerated framebuffer (with support for scanning out multiple resolutions and color depths on a single screen).
Sorry, I was generalizing the "typical" pre-1995 system one would find in commercial installations, which in general were character-based. But I'm sure the Amiga solution would have been nice and fast too, since they were pretty powerful and programmers back then didn't feel the need to bring in PhoneGap, React, or 5,280 npm packages in order to display what amounts to a form.
You missed a fun part of that story! The person who programmed it was a kid in the district at the time. They continued to hire him to come back and maintain it any time they had issues, which apparently was fairly rare.
Not really. The 386 does not have an interface to read the ROM direclty. Instead, it uses the Built-In Self-Test (BIST) to verify the ROM's contents. It's basically a checksum-like mechanism that verify the integrity of the CROM.
80386 Microcode Disassembled - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247004 - May 2026 (42 comments)
They might also run Linux kernel 3.7, that supported i386. Gray386linux is still maintained, and runs a patched 3.7 kernel.
https://github.com/marmolak/gray386linux
[0] https://github.com/spinalhdl/vexriscv
The roughly equivalent VexRISC configuration (full with MMU) is only 2736 LUTs, running at 124 Mhz (on Cyclone V, which I'm pretty sure is the same arch)
I remember the link some month ago where that one small shop ran completely on an old Amiga (?IIRC, not sure, was linked here)
Around 98/99 I was involved in a small IT-management company serving SME around the region, we had a client producing distinct metal objects with a big press; this got feeded once a day with a 5.25 floppy from another machine with production data - and it was still in use while we had already ethernet/USB/3.5 floppies etc. :-D
A ton of industrial equipment are still using win 3.1.
As for the Windows 3.x based industrial equipment: Some industrial devices I have worked on in the past turned out to actually be ARM based, running Linux, but the software went a long way to convincingly fake old Windows style UI or emulate a DOS prompt. I was once tasked to extend such a UI library to faithfully reproduce Windows 98 style color gradient borders.
Only once have I seen an actual embedded 486SX with my own eyes, but not in active use anymore. Last year, someone dragged a dusty, old, weirdo Siemens telephony box to the the local Hackerspace. The box itself had a design language that screamed "Star Trek: Voyager". I found a UART, it was running "On Time RTOS-32" which, according to the German Wikipedia, was an RTOS with a Windows API compatible userspace, developed by a German company in 1996 and discontinued in 2023.
IBM mainframes have an embedded PC (the "Support Element") used to manage the hardware configuration and diagnostics. Originally, it ran OS/2. In 2005, IBM replaced it with Linux–running a UI which looked like OS/2. (At some point more recently, they refreshed the visual look so it doesn't look like OS/2 any more, although I'm not sure when they did that.)
I can't think of examples offhand but you bet your ass there are donut shops and auto body repair services running 386s to do POS, inventory, and the like. Some of them may be driving terminals off Xenix.
I immediately wondered ... how long the new system would last or be used .... and how long it would be problem free ?
so there's still a chance
80386 Microcode Disassembled
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247004