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From: walton%Deimos@CIT-HAMLET.ARPA
Newsgroups: fa.info-vax
Subject: VAX Memory
Message-ID: <850907134655.001@Deimos>
Date: Sat, 7-Sep-85 16:46:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: Deimos.850907134655.001
Posted: Sat Sep  7 16:46:55 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Sep-85 02:55:14 EDT
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Here at Caltech astronomy we have two 780's, each equipped with 4Mb of
memory. One of them is sufficiently old that it has 16K chips on its
memory board, while the other has 64K chips.  My impression is that prices
for VAX memory are quite ridiculous.  The least expensive upgrade to 8 Mb
for both machines which anyone here has come up with is $24,000 or so,
which includes a new controller to allow 64K chips to be used in the older
machine and 12 Mb of memory boards with 64 Kb chips.  This is $2000 per
megabyte, which is something like 10 times what computer memory costs in
the IBM PC world.  Why??  Is it simply because DEC's prices are so high
that their competitors can charge high prices while still underselling
DEC?  I realize that VAX memory has to be error correcting and not just
error checking, and that it has to be faster than a PC's memory, but
still... (PDP-11 memory seems to be somewhat higher priced, as well.  I
have seen ads for 4 Mb on a single Q-bus board priced at $4000.)

A releted question is whether or not we have missed a trick--is there a
cheaper way to do this?  In particular, are there VAX memories made up of
256K bit chips?

What's the cheapest memory anyone out there has purchased for a 780?
Send to me directly, and I'll summarize to the net.

				Steve Walton
				Caltech Solar Astronomy
				BITNET: walton@citdeimo
				ARPAnet: swalton%deimos@cit-hamlet