Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: 68020
Message-ID: <5906@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 6 Feb 89 17:06:43 GMT
References: <19939@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Distribution: usa
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 47

in article <19939@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, c60a-1fy@web-2a.berkeley.edu (Anon) says:

> The new ronin mem board which has been shipping for 3 or 4 months does indeed
> run at zero wait states, so if you have one wait state, it is an earlier
> board.  

Perhaps so, but if that's the case, they really screwed themselves.  The board
I reviewed for Amiga Sentry was in fact a 1 wait-state design.  That review 
was only last fall, and you'd certainly think, if someone's going to send you
a thing for review, they'd send you the latest.  Oh, well, it really doesn't
matter anyway.

> I was told by them that you can expect an overall 20% increase using their 
> new mem board vs. the commodore board.  

That would be a fair statement for memory bound things, all else being
equal.  But all things aren't equal.  For instance, if you run my latest
SetCPU program on an A2620, you can get things like layers and FFP bound
stuff running about 200%-400% faster than on any Ronin '020 board.  But it
doesn't really matter.

> I was also told by a friend working for them that their present 030 board 
> will plug into their 020 board, a CSA board, and even a MACII, but NOT a 
> commodore board due to a design flaw in commodore's accelerator.

Ronin has an unfortunate habit of equating things that don't understand or
design decisions they don't like with "Commodore design flaw".  They're wrong.
For more examples of this, see my Sentry article.

> As far as future products, UNIX (AMIX), etc, they are of course working on
> stuff.  I have been told things, but promised to secrecy, so you should
> call them 'cause I don't know what is and is not ok for me to divulge.

It would be possible to run AMIX on a third party '030 board.  But it won't
be easy.  In addition, this was a conscious decision, there's no reason AMIX
couldn't have been made specific to the A2620 if we wanted it to be so.  
Ronin doesn't have the resources to do their own UNIX port, obviously, but
if they get a hardware guy that'll stop trying to do all the dirty work in
software (see the '030 tower for an example of this -- they can't use the 
data cache on non-Ronin memory), the could get AMIX up on their board.  Of
course, they don't yet have AMIX.

> -vince lee
-- 
Dave Haynie  "The 32 Bit Guy"     Commodore-Amiga  "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: D-DAVE H     BIX: hazy
              Amiga -- It's not just a job, it's an obsession