radford@calgary.UUCP (Radford Neal) (02/12/85)
> >Another relevant question is, does your memory have zero wait states? > >People I trust tell me that the 32016's performance deteriorates > >*SHARPLY* when wait states are introduced -- it's much worse than > >you would expect, and in particular it's not linear in the number of > >wait states. If the systems' performance deteriorates more than linearly with wait states I think something other than the chip is at fault. The only thing I can think of is that fixed interval interrupts are occuring (e.g. a regular 100/second timer interrupt, or regular serial line or mouse interrupts). If the interrupts are already taking 50% of the CPU, doubling memory access time can make the system infinitely slower. We have a 68000 system which appears to go an order of magnitude slower when run with only moderately slower memory for this reason. Radford Neal The University of Calgary