evans@mhuxt.UUCP (Sukie Crandall) (05/09/87)
I now have about 24 solid hours on a Prodigy Prime upgrade to a Mac+. For what it is worth the upgrade consists of a 68020 and 68881 running at 16MHz with 2 Meg of RAM (in my case). All of this clips onto the Mac's 68000. The unit has its own ps as well as a small fan (medium loud). The board looked very professional - what one expects of Levco. I suspect I have a very early sample, so I was somewhat surprised. Installation was straightforward and was done by the local Levco dealer (although you could do it yourself without much difficulty). The only reported problem here was the programmer's switch -- it seems the Levco board slightly moves the Mac motherboard with respect to the slots. A swiss army knife saved the day. The result is pretty breath-taking. Windows fly open and programs "happen" at much swifter rates than one is used to seeing. I ran the Mandelbrot "benchmark" kindly posted by Steven Eubank recently. For 24 iterations I was getting about 7100 flops with the 68881 bypassed (the SANE version). With the 68881 I got up to something over 63kflops. I can't compare that with a standard Mac+ as we can't get the machine to return to the Mac+ only mode at this point (the box came w/o instructions and only with a small amount of s/w). The upgrade is highly compatible with existing software. Things like Word 3.0, Statview 512, Versaterm 2.something, MPW, Lightspeed C, and even - get this -- MS flight simulator (it only changes the update rate -- the simulation is much better on the Prime) work well. The only things I've had problems with are MacLightning 2.0 (a spelling program) and ExperLisp 2.1. A RAM disk is supposed to come with the package - it didn't, so I can't report on it yet. So far I am VERY impressed. Total cost was around $2k (a slight discount) and I have what seems like a very hot Mac. I have some simulation programs that currently run on a 780 - my guess is that I will do about as well on the Prime. -- I forgot to mention -- no problems with my DataFrame 20 (the old flavor). I have heard comments about Prodigy 4s being incompatible with some HDs. So if you are getting a new machine from scratch get the Mac II. If you already have a Mac and don't need the big screen or color the Prime may be a very good alternative. Steve Crandall
jww@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU (Joel West) (05/09/87)
Thursday, I did a straight CPU-intensive timing test on a Prodigy 4 and a
prototype Mac II. The speeds were identical (same 16 MHz 68020).
Although it was a simple DBRA loop, and thus might favor the 68020
cache, both were 4.8 * (speed of Mac Plus).
--
Joel West
{ucbvax,ihnp4}!sdcsvax!jww (ihnp4!gould9!joel if I ever fix news)
jww@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu if you must