Building a new system....

[Frank J. Carmickle]

Sir you are most certainly correct.  My statements were to say that if you
can avoid it you would have one less thing slowing down the pci bus.  One
thing that we do need to look at in new systems using the ev6 bus is that
memory, processor, and pci bus are on a crossbar switch.  So there is no
system bus.  Look at some docs on alphas to see what I am talking about.
Now it would have been really cool if the guys at amd went with a slotb
instead of the slota.  We could of had machines that were interchangable
alpha with athlon.  The really cool idea that some folks were hoping for
was a way to have an athlon and an alpha on the same board.  That would
take some major os rewriting!  Although I would want one.  An OS that was
cross platform on one machine at the same time.  A lot of the developers
over on the alphaNT list were doing some dreaming for where the smp code
could go.

Frank


On Mon, 16 Oct 2000, Kirk Wood wrote:

> Actually, all of the system goes through wait states when accessing any
> bus. In order of speed we have the CPU, then memory bus, then PCI bus,
> then ISA bus. So yes, the ISA bus is noticably slower then any of the rest
> of the system. And yes the system must wait on it when an access occurs.
> 
> PCI is much superior to the ISA bus, but it is totally unrealistic to say
> that it is unstable. You would have a hrad time selling that to all the
> people using machines that use an ISA bus (some of which have run
> continuously for years.
> 
> Now I am with Buddy, that an ISA slot could be a good thing. I don't know
> of a lower cost speach synth then the internal Double Talk. Perhaps the
> tripple talk costs arround the same I don't know. And if a person owns a
> working double talk I really can't see justification to get a new synth
> all in the name of no ISA port. (And by the way often times serial an
> parellel ports are hung off the ISA bus even when there are no ISA slots
> made available. The chips for that are cheaper then making them PCI.)
> 
> 
> =======
> Kirk Wood
> Cpt.Kirk at 1tree.net
> 
> 
> 
> 
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