forrest%sybase.com@sun.com (03/08/89)
If you're like me you have a fair amount of ~150nsec 64K and 256K chips
in your old XT-clone. Now that you're thinking of upgrading to a 386
clone you're wondering what to do with this memory since it appears
that it can't be used in today's garden variety 20 Mhz machines which
seem to need 80nsec or ~100nsec memory.
What I'd like to see is some kind of memory board that could be
plugged into a 16bit (or even a 8bit) slot that would allow this
"slow" memory to be used as a RAM disk in the extended (or expanded ?)
memory address space of a 386. Although wait states would probably have to be
used to access this memory, I imagine
that the data transfer rate would still be better than going to
a true disk, at least for OS's like MSDOS that don't support
multi-tasking.
As far as I know, all the existing memory boards either require
full speed memory or else can't be used outside the 640K limit.
Does anyone know of any exceptions to this? Are there any memory
boards that do what I want that could be put in 20 Mhz 386 clones?
Jon Forrest
forrest%sybase.com@sun.com
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