On Saturday 31 January 2004 13:28, Zane H. Healy wrote:
Anything
droolworthy in the 20s? I'm always interested in SBus
stuff, even if only to turn green at cards others have :)
Oh, would that be stuff like S-Bus expansion boxes, 16-port Serial
cards, or quad 100Mbit Ethernet? Those are some of the coolest S-Bus
widgets I've got. I'm also somewhat fond of the combo 10Mbit
Ethernet/Narrow SCSI cards.
Of course what I drool over are the dual 50Mhz M-Bus modules that
will let you turn a Sparc 20 into a Quad-processor box. Not that I
would have any use at all for a system with them in it.
Then you'd love the dual-90MHz ROSS module I've got (along with a
single-90 module in an SS20 to create a 3 processor "frankenstein"), or
the pair of Dual-100MHz ROSS modules I've got in another machine. The
90s are nicer that the 100s though in my opinion, since they don't take
up any s-bus slots like the 100MHz ones do. (the heatsink on the 100s
is two slots wide because those things run HOT! The 90s aren't
anywhere near as bad.)
The one thing I like about it is that even though it won't take as much
memory, and doesn't have as many SBUS slots (or drive bays), the SS20
with a pair of 100MHz procs is probably just as fast as an 8-way 50MHz
SS1000, and a small fraction of the weight. Of course, you're limited
to IIRC 512MB of ram in the machine...
Adding on the expansion box might be interesting though. I saw one of
those a few months ago, but didn't bother with it because it didn't
have a cable to connect it to a machine with (or the card for the
machine's SBUS slot).
I managed to pick up the 90's pretty cheaply on eBay about a year ago;
the 100s were "retired" from a university machine about 3 years ago -
an SS20 that served around 1000 EE/CompE students for things like
Matlab, pSpice, gcc, and g++. Can you say underpowered?
Pat
--
Purdue University ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage
http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/