You (Drew Eckhardt) wrote:
>
>
> The original mips design seemed to be basically mips+simm slots
> on ISA bus and
>
> Not on an ISA bus, but with an ISA bus for people who insist on
> having PC-compatable expansion slots.
No, the original project was indeed, as Bill wrote, to build a card
with a MIPS processor and some memory to put into a PC. This was soon
changed to build a motherboard, however (But you should know that,
Drew. The first mail I got on this list was by Neil answering (among
other things) your claim that there isn't enough real estate on an isa
board).
> IMHO, it seems to have been postponed because of
>
> 1. No suitable DMA/DRAM/peripherial controller is available -
> the 3730 isn't shipping and the Visual MOM chipset lacks
> support for slave mode DMA. (Has anyone looked at the
> NEC chipset?)
>
> 2. The 4200 would be faster, and should be cheaper than the
> 3081. Availability at this point is questionable.$
>
> 3. In 6-9 months, IDT ships the Orion, an R4000 compatable chip.
> Also faster and cheaper than the 3081.
It seems so. But this happened only recently, whereas Bill was talking
about a decision made a month ago. But I don't like going back to the
mips+ram-on-a-card idea. I like it even less if its going to be a vesa
card. I have an old 25MHz 386 without vesa. When I buy a new computer
it it will either be a high-end 486 or some RISC workstation. I will
not buy a 486sx just to plug a crippled mips motherboard into it.
hp
--
| _ | Peter J. Holzer | Think of it |
| |_|_) | Technical University Vienna | as evolution |
| | | | Computer Science/Real-Time Systems | in action! |
| __/ | hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at | Tony Rand |
|