Accelerator boards - no future? Bad business?

[Geoffrey Oltmans]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 2:17 PM, <ethan at 757.org> wrote:

>
>> The
>> other is that many Amigas had processor "slots" (with edge connectors)
>> rather than some tiny fiddly ball-grid array etc...  but I'm not a EE; so
>> maybe that's bunk.
>>
>>
> High clock rates for data busses of modern systems wouldn't work with old
> style card edge interconnects AFAIK. Also, I don't think the old PPC
> accelerators for the Amiga or the ones for the Macs (that sometimes had CPU
> upgrade slots) would really accelerate everything - you might get faster
> processor instructions and maybe L1/L2 cache -- but memory and I/O are
> still slow?


Well, the native memory, and peripherals, yeah sure, that was still "slow."
(but still adequate).  Most every accelerator board available for Amiga had
it's own dedicated on-board memory and SCSI adapter for faster IO where it
really mattered most. The other major thing being graphics adapters ran
better on the 3000 and 4000 since those had 32-bit busses (and with higher
speed and burst modes available), so they kinda sorta planned on people
putting faster processors on those than what they were shipped with (and in
some cases didn't have a CPU on the motherboard even).

Not sure about the Apple front.