[geeks] Fun compariosn between Mac Plus and AMD Dual Core PC

Sridhar Ayengar ploopster at gmail.com
Fri Jul 20 13:36:09 CDT 2007


nate at portents.com wrote:
>>> There's a very perverse processor upgrade module for the 7200 that lives
>>> on a PCI card.  The original processor boots Mac OS, and an INIT
>>> identifies the add-in card, gets the main CPU's caches into a known
>>> state, and then "pivots" the running system over to the faster
>>> processor.
>> Wow.  That's pretty strange.
>>
>> The only card-based processor upgrades I've ever used are MCA cards that
>> just take over the bus.
> 
> If you think that's strange, how about the Radius Skylab project.  Never
> made it to market, but picture a rack mount system with fourteen NuBus
> slots filled with Radius Rocket 'accelerators' (really complete Mac
> systems on a card, sans ROM), fifteen 3.5" drive bays, and four 5.25"
> drive bays, booted/controlled by a Mac SE/30 as a console, and designed
> for cluster computing/render farm type tasks.

I think that's actually less strange.  I've seen other machines put 
together like that.

Peace...  Sridhar



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