4 Megg SIMMs. Should I or shouldn't I?

[Alexis Rosen]

In article <BARNETT.90Nov6083827 at grymoire.crd.ge.com> barnett at crdgw1.ge.com writes:
> [in response to my note about the Nat. Semi. RAM board]
>I didn't realize this. I knew the NuBus was slow, but this is ridiculous.
>I guess I have been spoiled by *real* workstations. :-)

Well, let's not be _too_ critical. It's a lot more powerful than the Sbus.
And it's not so far behind VMEbus. But today's high-speed processors demand
a specialized high-speed connection to memory. This includes all the Sparc
machines and the RS-6000s (current speed champs?) as well as the Mac. They
all use SIMM slots of some sort. (The IBM has an intermediary board which
does all sorts of slick stuff, but it's irrelevant in this context). In fact,
on the IBM, even with the direct access to memory, they need such a high
bandwidth that they interleave four ways (eight?).

So the Mac is not really any different from the current crop of workstations.
Like all of them, it wants special connections for RAM. The only difference
between it and other workstations is that it can't deal with more than 32MB
(unless, possibly, you have 16MB SIMMs).

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis