richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) (11/25/87)
We have a bunch of DN 300's around here, that get used mostly
as terminals. They will in all liklyhood be replaced with 'AT'
class machines of one sort or another (DN3000, DN4000, DN?000)
eventually, but there is something bothering me.
We *could* upgrade them to 330's by giving Apollo $5 to $7 K
and gain a 68020 out of it. But for that kind of money, getting
performence on the order of a DN3000 is not good enough when
one considers one could buy a diskless 3000 node for the same
price.
Now, what WOULD make this a viable upgrade is if ther were
a way to upgrade a 300 to a 25 Mhz 68020, or better yet a 68030.
We'd buy one for each of our 300's.
(This is a religious issue with me. DN3000's look like PC-AT's.
DN300's look like COMPUTERS ! :-)
How bout it Apollo ? DN380 anyone ?
--
Richard J. Sexton
INTERNET: richard@gryphon.CTS.COM
UUCP: {hplabs!hp-sdd, sdcsvax, ihnp4, nosc}!crash!gryphon!richard
"It's too dark to put the keys in my ignition..."krowitz@mit-richter.UUCP.UUCP (11/25/87)
Don't hold your breath ... we've been wanting to get more than 3 MB of memory on our existing DN330's since the day we got them (only a few months before the DN3000 was announced). You would figure that if they could put 2MB plus the entire CPU on one board, that the memory expansion board could handle at least another 2MB. We even heard that a part number had been assigned to larger memory boards for the DN330, but no such board seems to exists. Since the minimum memory requirement is going to grow when SR10 comes out, this is a major concern to us. The problem seems to be one of volume production -- Apollo can turn out DN3000's in large numbers very cheaply. The demand for DN3xx upgrades is smaller, and the production costs for small runs is high. In addition, a 20 or 25Mhz CPU would require a completely new memory design and/or a cache. The existing memory systems can't keep up with the 68020 at speeds past 16Mhz. This is why the DN5xx-Turbos require the memory system upgrades and why the DN4000 comes with an 8Kb cache built into it. -- David Krowitz mit-erl!mit-kermit!krowitz@eddie.mit.edu mit-erl!mit-kermit!krowitz@mit-eddie.arpa krowitz@mit-mc.arpa (in order of decreasing preference)