Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uflorida!haven!grebyn!ckp
From: ckp@grebyn.com (Checkpoint Technologies)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Additional CPUs (was: A rough future for the Amiga???)
Message-ID: <19594@grebyn.com>
Date: 11 Apr 90 14:19:30 GMT
References: <16192@snow-white.udel.EDU> <1990Apr8.013940.12984@wam.umd.edu> <10715@cbmvax.commodore.com> <19543@grebyn.com> <1990Apr10.163745.16255@wam.umd.edu> <14895@s.ms.uky.edu>
Reply-To: ckp@grebyn.UUCP (Checkpoint Technologies)
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing, Vienna, VA, USA
Lines: 16

In article <14895@s.ms.uky.edu> sam@ms.uky.edu (Michael W. Mills) writes:
>ddev@wam.umd.edu (Don DeVoe) writes:
>
>It isn't standard equipment an a regular A2000, just like the extras of the
>IIfx aren't standard on a regular Mac II.  The 2090 (and now 2091) ARE, however,
>standard equipment on higher end amigas.  (And the 2091 is a great improvement
>over the 2090 anyway.)

But the A2091 no longer has a Z80 CPU.  It seems that when ST506 was
dropped, the added CPU cost more than it was worth and took too much
space on a board that also had to hold 2 meg RAM and a disk drive.

SCSI is obviously easier to control, due to the disk drive intelligence
that must be present anyway.  And even the Mac IIfx doesn't have an IO
CPU to control it's SCSI interface, though they have adopted DMA for the
first time ever.