Whatever Happened To . . .

TI's Rio Grande Chip?

Dave Andrews

(see "TI Charges into the Notebook CPU Wars," April 1994 BYTE, p. 36)

Texas Instruments hoped that manufacturers of subnotebooks would flock to its Rio Grande chip, a 486SX-class processor that integrated a PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus interface and memory controller with aggressive power management and low power consumption (3.3 V). But two factors helped shelve the chip.

One was that as TI was preparing to release the 486SX-class chip (it had no FPU), the company's notebook partners were shifting to higher-performing 486 processors. Also, it turned out that customers weren't buying a lot of subnotebooks at the time because notebooks that weighed less than 4 pounds had too many compromises.

TI is back in the note book and consumer markets with an 80-MHz 486-class processor called the TI486DX2, which should enter volume production this month. TI cites the first-quarter 1995 Storeboard Channel Tracking Service, which reported that 57 percent of PCs sold through retail channels in the U.S. were based on 486DX-class processors.