From: broadley@neurocog.lrdc.pitt.edu (Bill Broadley) Subject: Re: MIPS R3000 board project; update. Date: 21 Jun 1993 05:39:32 GMT
Hmmm I just reread this thread and I agree with the original design.
The mips 3000 is a cost effective cpu that's popular enough to make porting
a free unix to it. It's strong points being: Very good performance relative
to a 486, clean risc design, cheap, popularity (lots of unix boxes out
there aready run gcc/gas on them), and a clear upgrade path for the future.
(not that I'd mind the price deltas to a 4000 or a 4400, the power pc
601 at 50 Mhz is supposed to be around $320 I believe)
I have no love of the 486 architecture and would love to see a clean, lean
free unix on a good risc chip at alot of people could afford. Intel gets
appalling amounts of money for the 486/586 chips which as far as I can tell
have the WORST price/performance.
I don't really see any reason to put so much on board, last I heard there would
be mips 3000 + support chips, isa support, ethernet, video, and scsi. Are
all these going to be on some internal non isa bus? Will they be implemented
well enough to justify their cost? Will the bundled video be faster then the
new cheap acccelerated video cards available?
I'm open for discussion but I'd rather have a mips 3000 + ram on a isa
board, and use the existing cheap PC boards unless the internal bus for
video/scsi/ethernet provide such a big advantage over what I can
get cheap for the ISA bus.