moriarty@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff Meyer) (08/22/87)
In article <1063@runx.ips.oz> clubmac@runx.OZ (Macintosh Users Group - Sydney, Australia) writes: > Which brings me to my question: How much are the SIMMs and who's the best > supplier? A supplier here in Australia is selling their own SIMMs ( made > with Toshiba (where's that damn sub?) 120ns 1-mbit chips) for $995 for > 2 meg (US$700). We would like to see whether it is worthwhile to buy them > from the US. I'm afraid it's that Damn Sub, indeed... you see, Toshiba makes 60% of the 1 MB SIMMs in the world, and the Toshiba freeze is making them damn difficult to come by in the US. You'll probably be able to find them more easily in Australia; HOWEVER, Dove is selling the 2MB upgrade for US $669 through Icon Review, so you're not getting any great deal. If you're going to get the chips direct, I'd hope you could get them cheaper than from Dove -- otherwise, what's the point? Of coure, prices will (and are) going up here as the shortage for these chips becomes acute... "Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will. -- John Kenneth Galbraith Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, allegra, hplsla, lbl-csam}!fluke!moriarty CREDO: You gotta be Cruel to be Kind... <*> DISCLAIMER: Do what you want with me, but leave my employers alone! <*>
marcus@weyl.Berkeley.EDU (Matthew Marcus) (08/26/87)
A note about memory prices : Open Mac enterprises at 140 Mason Circle, Suite H, Concord,CA 94520 is selling 1 Meg SIMMs for the mac II @ 4 for $999. They are 100 or 120 nanoseconds. And come with a two year warranty. I decided to buy 4 256K SIMMs to go to 2 Megs. Their price $200. Disclaimer : Ihave no connection with OPEN MAC other than being a satisfied customer. mat marcus ucbvax!brahms!marcus marcus@brahms.berkeley.edu ucbvax!marcus@brahms.berkeley.edu
russell@acf3.NYU.EDU (Bill Russell) (09/11/87)
I'm also a satisfied Open Mac memory customer -- BUT, if you are faint-hearted about wiggling and twisting things on pc boards you might be little squeamish about installing their SIMM's. There are two small capacitors (I guess that's what they are) on very short leads sticking out of the SIMMs just to one side of where the SIMM bracket plastic finger wants to sit. On three of the four OM SIMMs I installed in my MacII I had to wiggle and push the caps to one side to make the little boards fit into their brackets. It was scary -- but they all work fine. -r (Richard Reich as russell@nyu)
graifer@net1.ucsd.edu (Dan Graifer) (09/11/87)
From the discussion of installing 100 & 120ns SIMMs on MacIIs, I conclude
that at 16Mhz, the memory access is 1 wait state. Is this correct? Is
this forced by the bus architecture, or is it just to keep the memory
price down? If you used 80ns memory (assuming such could be had for less
than the national debt), could coprocessors on other boards get to the
memory with zero wait states?
It's amazing what a difference this makes. When forced to use an MS-DOS
machine, I use a 10Mhz 80286 machine with 100ns 0 wait state memory. This
has been benched out at only 15-20% slower than 80386 16Mhz 1 wait state
machines.
I suspect this is why Motorola is moving so heavily into on-chip cache
structures; Clearly, the bottleneck on current microprocessors is not
their speed, but the bandwidth to memory!
Also, given that I like my Mac, but I am frequently forced into MS-DOS by
business considerations, what is the structure of the AST coprocessor
boards? Do they have their own, on-board memory, or do they share the
Mac's? In either case, what is their clock speed, and how many wait
states to memory? Frequently, in the Intel world, the math coprocessor
is run at a different speed than the main chip. Do these add-on boards
support intel coprocessors, and if so, what speed do they run at.
Is that enough questions?
E-mail me your answers, and requests for summaries. I will E-mail or
post as demand warrants.
Thanks in advance...
Dan Graifer
graifer@net1.UCSD.EDU
Disclaimer: Nobody ever listens to me anyways; Why should they start now?