CRITICAL CORRECTION to [More memory to SPARCstation1]
Christopher North-Keys
harp at terra.pkg.mcc.com
Wed Feb 14 17:07:52 AEST 1990
An innocent user sent me the following, expecting to save money by loading
a 4/390 with 100ns RAMs. This is not good. The 4/390's use 40 ns chips.
The poor machine would not be a very happy puppy after such treatment, I
don't think...
|I found this on the Sun system administrator's bulletin board. Basically
|what it says is that we should spec the 4MB memory SIMMs for use on
|the Suns as 100ns access (or better), block (or "page') mode not required,
|9 bits wide, physically mountable on a Sun 4/390 memory board.
|
|| Date: Thu, 8 Feb 90 10:40:45 EST
|| From: bob at morningstar.com (Bob Sutterfield)
|| Subject: More memory to SPARCstation1
|
|| From: ks at tut.fi (Syst Kari)
|| Is access-time 100ns enough or should it be faster?
|
|That's fine.
|
| [ text deleted ]
>From the Sun3 and Sun4/SPARC Hardware_Configuration_Guides, November 1989:
(Cycle time is measured in nanoseconds.)
Table 1-1 (excerpt) Sun-3 Sun-4 and SPARCsystems CPU/Memory Overview
|
| |----------Sun-3--------| |-Sun-4-| |--------SPARC---------|
| 50 60 80 150 260 470 100 200 1 330 370 390
|MEMORY:
|Err Detect bp bp bp bp ECC ECC par ECC |--synchronous parity--|
|Cycle Time 270 200 100 270 80 30 70 60 50 |----- 40 ns -----|
I returned the (hopefully accurate) response:
Be sure to purchase memory with cycle times at or below specification for
the target machine. Plugging in the wrong memory addition would cut the
speed of the machine by a factor of at least two (I believe), effectively
wasting an enormous amount of the purchase price of the machine. Puttin
100ns memory in a SS 390 would be idiocy.
Note that even the SS1 uses 50 ns memory, rather than 100.
Christopher North-Keys
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