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From: whitewolf@gnh-starport.cts.com (Tae Song)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Apple II... OLD?!?
Message-ID: <9005091437.AA18970@apple.com>
Date: 9 May 90 15:10:59 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 28
X-Unparsable-Date: Wed May  9 90 at 04:47:19 (EDT)

Is the Apple II old???  Well, maybe the 8-bit Apples... but certainly NOT the
GS!

The issue isn't weather the GS is old or not, but about speed.  It's got to be
one of the slowest machines around with a clock speed of 2.5-2.7Mhz.  That's
only little more than half the clock speed of an IBM PC (4.77Mhz).  The 65816
is extremely poorly designed in many ways.

It only has 3 registers, lacks lot of logic circuits to shave cycles on many of
the instructions.  Has trouble running at high speeds.

The GS design isn't so hot either... somewhere the GS engineering must've
gotten confused.  The GS can be expanded to 8M, but only 4 of those are DMA
compatible.  They must've thought of limiting to 4M like on the Macs... we
(Apple) won't want a computer that can hold more memory than a Mac would we
(Marketing).  Almost every I/O operations must be bottlenecked to 1Mhz,
including/during DMA accesses and even to built-in peripherals and video.

2.5 is a small# in any case... and if ASIC pulls through with the 20+Mhz 65816,
I can't see WHY Apple couldn't make a killer machine.  Even at 2.5Mhz the GS
puts in a good show... 20Mhz is 8x faster... if Apple let's the engineers wring
all the speed out with caches, DMAs, etc... I think seriously it would give
EVERY machine a run for their money.

Ok, I'm not a graceful writer... heck, all my English teachers would attest to
that but I just hope you ALL understand what I'm trying to say.  The GS is
running at all of 2.5Mhz!!!  It only takes two intelligent people to push that
# up to maybe 20-25Mhz... then you'd better watch out!