Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!udel!rochester!daemon
From: miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Brad Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Symbolics co-processor board for the Sparcstation-1 ?
Message-ID: <1989Sep6.205843.23261@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 6 Sep 89 20:58:43 GMT
Sender: daemon@cs.rochester.edu (Old Scratch)
Organization: University of Rochester Computer Science Department
Lines: 25


    In article <1989Sep6.000759.15274@cs.rochester.edu> miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Brad Miller) writes:

    >2) The Sparcstation-1 has NO bus whatsoever. Where would you plug an
    >embedded Ivory in? The serial port? :-)
    >

    No bus?  This is going to come as a *big* surprise to an awful lot of
    people.  I wonder where they've been connecting their color
    framebuffers...

    The SPARCstation 1 has a perfectly good bus.  It's called the S-bus.
    There are three connectors inside the box for S-bus cards.  These
    cards need to be roughly 3" by 5", so fitting a Lispm onto one would
    be a pretty impressive feat of engineering.

Yep, I misspoke on this one; I just found out there is a proprietary bus for
I/O devices. (Which of course one *could* treat the ivory as, but it would
lose performance wise). I'm amazed; the physical dimensions of the
Sparcstation don't look like it could handle anything of the sort... On it
being proprietary; has Sun published it's specs yet? Anyway, as Hank points
out, obviously existing technology would make a 3"x5" card hard to do, esp.
since one would either have to have local 40bit memory, or a cache to allow
the local processor to get 40bits doing 32bit fetches over the S-bus. I
don't think it would fit but maybe next generation :-)