jody@opus.shell.com (Jody Winston) (05/26/89)
Is there any third party choices for memory on the 240s? -- Jody Winston jody@shell.uucp ...!{sun,psuvax1,bcm,rice,decwrl,cs.utexas.edu}!shell!jody Shell Development Company, Bellaire Research Center P.O. Box 481, Room 2202, Houston, TX 77001 (Voice: 713 663-2050)
jim@thrush.Stanford.EDU (Jim Helman) (05/27/89)
I too would be interested if anyone knows what plugs into a 4D/2x0 memory board. SGI's memory prices appear to be seriously out of line with the market ($48,000 list for 40MB). Even with their educational discount, it appears to be overpriced. They also charge a quite a bit to maintain it (approx. $2,500/year list for 40MB, at market prices I could buy a lot of spare SIMMs for that). Normally, we don't like messing around with third party stuff, at least not on computers that haven't been out long enough to establish their own reliability and stability, but after seeing SGI's prices, it's worth a shot. As I understand it, the only memory on the 4D/2x0 processor boards is cache. So when you get the minimum 8MB configuration, that memory is on a separate board which can support up to 64MB of DRAMs. The question is what to plug in. There are issues of speed, e.g. 80 or 100ns, and addressing mode, e.g. nibble burst mode. And since the memory system does error correction, it might not use usual 9x1mbit SIMMS, which only have one bit extra for parity. Anyone with a 4D/2x0 care to open it up and have a look? Any information would be much appreciated. Jim Helman Department of Applied Physics P.O. Box 10494 Stanford University Stanford, CA 94309 (jim@thrush.stanford.edu) (415) 723-4940