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From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: New Amiga questions: 2630 vs. GVP/Multisyncs
Message-ID: <10268@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 20 Mar 90 18:43:26 GMT
References: <25950@ut-emx.UUCP> <191@uncmed.med.unc.edu> <23211@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <1990Mar19.180839.21488@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <2606039B.1640@orion.oac.uci.edu> <1990Mar20.165016.16651@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax (Dave Haynie)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 39

In article <1990Mar20.165016.16651@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes:

>In article <2606039B.1640@orion.oac.uci.edu> you write:
>>In article <1990Mar19.180839.21488@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes:

>>Both are great products and each offers
>>it own pro's and con's yet neither is a poorly designed product as is implied
>>above.  While, I like the GVP and it IS faster than a stock A2630 I would have
>>to say that Dave Haynie is a heads and shoulders above anyone at GVP.  

Well, gee.  I certainly won't start an argument here.  And I am taller than most
of the GVP engineers I've met...

>	I'm sorry I left that misunderstanding. I did not mean to
>lower the A2630, just raise the GVP board. The burst-mode RAM, DMA
>access to on-board RAM and the connection to a hard drive via a 32 bit
>bus give it technological edges, IMHO.

Just a bit of clarification needed here.  DMA access to 32 bit RAM (either the
A2630's on-board RAM or the GVP's daughterboard RAM) is supported by both cards,
probably because of the rules I helped make up that say, if your memory is in
the 24 bit address space, it must autoconfigure and be DMA-able.  GVP is the 
only board other than the two Commodore boards, to date, to get this right.
Their hard drive interface is indeed on the 68030 bus, but it's only a 16-bit
wide imbedded AT style interface.  Dirt cheap to implement, but no faster than
SCSI.  The burst-mode memory is a nice feature, but didn't meet up with the
constraints of the A2630, which included support for 2 meg banks (nybble-mode
DRAM on a 32 bit bus gives you a minimum 4 meg bank) and on-card memory (you
can always build more clever memory systems if you have a whole daughtercard
to fit them onto).  

>>-Jason-

>Ethan Solomita: es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu

-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Systems Engineering) "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: hazy     BIX: hazy
                    Too much of everything is just enough