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Re: 20 MHz 65816





M. Pender wrote:
Wayne Stewart <waynes@telus.dotnet> wrote in message
news:kd6Ua.16321$46.3083695@news2.telusplanet.net...

The ZipGS is a caching accelerator as the TransWarpGS is. The major
difference was that it used a custom chip to replace a lot of the
individual ones the TransWarpGS used. The story that circulated
when they stoped production was that another run of this chip was
$10K+ and there was no market for that many cards. At that time at
least the cards just were't selling. Someone bought a ZipGS and posted
that Alltech had said there was only one ZipGS left, it took two months
to sell.


How many cards are in a production run?  $10K for 100 cards isn't so great,

I think you missed something. He said $10K+ for one chip, not one card.

Roy

but $10K for 1000 cards is a bit more attractive.


There were a couple of II+,IIe accelerators that were almost computers
on a card, the Titan and even more so the TransWarp(not the
transWarpGS). The TransWarp doesn;t use the II, II+ or IIe processor
or motherboard RAM so you can run with those sockets empty.


I've been thinking about the computer-on-a-card approach since I posted that
note about the Zip GSX and TranswarpGS.  At some point it does become less
expensive to incorporate the logic and functions of the motherboard into a
single chip.

It has seemed to me that putting the CPU and RAM all on one card, and perhaps adding itmes like ethernet/IDE/Video enhancements would be teh best way to extend the //gs. Alas, I'm so ignorant that dreaming is all I can achieve in this area.


It would probably cost less to design a new Apple II-type computer with an
FPGA or ASIC that incorporates the functionality of a 65816-20, two serial
ports, a display driver, an IDE disk driver and an ethernet adapter, than it
would cost to add comparable functionality to the IIgs.

Well, having the megachip and the IWM/SWIM wouldn't be cheap!

Roy


It will be interesting to see how things play out with the new C-one (the
Commodore-64 uber-clone) which uses the same old 65816-14 chips, but
overclocks them to 20 MHz.  IIRC the new motherboard design incorporates
some IBM-compatible features, like PS/2 keyboard and mouse connectors.  I
haven't heard anything about USB ports, a hard drive or ethernet capability
though.

- Mike





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