On Sun, 20 Nov 2011, Ben Hutchings wrote:

On Sun, 2011-11-20 at 16:30 +0100, Kai Wasserbäch wrote:

[..]

Apart from that I wonder how many "embedded" x86 CPUs (instruction set < 586)
are out there. Are they still sold in current products?


As I said, Soekris still seems to have some for sale, but they are just
using up their remaining stock of CPUs.


There still is a rather large market for 486-class systems, it's just not
very visible to the average consumer. It's the industrial PCs (IPC), for
example the PC/104 form factor. The first google page gives this:


http://www.prinser.com/SearchResult.aspx?CategoryID=25
http://www.emacinc.com/sbc_pc.htm#486sbc
http://www.aton-sys.fr/English/produits/liste_tous.htm
http://www.cpuboards.com/cpu-boards/bus-interface-pc-104

Granted, they're not powerful (they don't need to be), but they're still
being produced(!) and sold, and they are a very interesting target for a
Debian environment.


Now personally I'm not running these and I don't care much about 486
systems, but I'd say that any dropping of support for these industrial
boards should be considered really carefully.



Best regards,

Anne Bezemer