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From: long@mcntsh.enet.dec.com (Rich Long)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Dove Marathon 030 at $449 -- a good deal?
Message-ID: <14668@shlump.nac.dec.com>
Date: 17 Aug 90 16:26:50 GMT
Sender: newsdaemon@shlump.nac.dec.com
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 28


In article <1990Aug15.144233.6988@ee.rochester.edu>, rajiv@ee.rochester.edu (Rajiv Arora) writes...
>I know this was discussed a few months ago, but could someone tell me *what*
>the Marathon is? I gather it is NOT an accelerator, but why not? Surely a 68030
>at 16MHz will speed up my lowly 68000/8MHz Plus. What am I missing?

The Marathon is not an accelerator, though some ads say otherwise. It is a
"processor upgrade". The board itself is absurdly simple--a 68030 and some
support logic--and clips onto your existing 68000. The '030 itself runs at
16MHz (2x the mothership rate), but the board has no on-board memory,
therefore it must access memory through the motherboard (16 bit data path,
8MHz). This is the bottleneck.

I just bought one for my SE, along with Virtual 2.0. It works very well,
except sound is "scratchy" unless the instruction cache is turned off. The
speedup is negligible, but there is probably *some*. I don't believe in
benchmarks anyway; seat of the pants feel is more important to me.

Anyway, it comes bundled with SUM and SAM. Now if you don't care about those,
you could sell them, I guess, which drops the real price of the board.

It's a good way to get into cheap VM, and Virtual is wonderful. Nice job,
Connectix!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 /~~)  /~~  /   |      long@mcntsh.enet.dec.com       | Don't take life too
/~~\  /__  /__  | ...!decwrl!mcntsh.enet.dec.com!long | seriously; you won't
Richard C. Long | long%mcntsh.dec@decwrl.enet.dec.com | get out alive anyway.