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

[Bruce Barnett]

In article <1990Nov7.033951.6420 at panix.uucp> alexis at panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) writes:

>   >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.

The SBus has a few features: Cheap. Fast. Multiple Masters.
The SBus graphics Accelerator (GX) has the ability to scale with the speed
of the CPU. The same Sbus device supports the 27 MIP Sparc 2 and will
also support a 50 MIPS Sun.

If the NuBus is better, send me e-mail off line and we can
continue this discussion without boring people.

>   And it's not so far behind VMEbus. 

True, Sun added an extra set of connectors on the VME bus to handle
fast memory. But the Sun is a workstation company who thinks about
DMA, virtual memory, etc. External memory boards worked fine on
the Sun 3/Sun4 VME family.

>   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 reason why some workstations don't have external memory boards
is that they can put enough directly on the main CPU board.

Some workstations will need 256MBytes (or more) of memory, and these
support a bus that allows access at memory speeds.


I guess I was looking for a cheap way to add more memory. Sigh.
--
Bruce G. Barnett	barnett at crd.ge.com	uunet!crdgw1!barnett