[Forum] Any interest in Zorro cards? | ANN.lu |
Posted on 16-Dec-2001 01:32 GMT by Ian Stedman | 147 comments View flat View list |
I am currently toying with the idea of designing a Zorro card for the Amiga. What would the interest be in a card with the following:
10/100 mbit Ethernet, 2 X High speed serial ports, 1 X ECP/EPP parallel port & IrDa?
There is some preliminary information on my website
I am also looking at the possibility of adding a Zorro to ISA bridge and making the card work in Zorro 2 and Zorro 3 Amigas.
Are there any other features you would like?
If you are interested, please email me. If there is enough interest I will look at making some prototypes and if feasible, a short production run.
|
|
List of all comments to this article |
Any interest in Zorro cards? : Comment 75 of 147 | ANN.lu |
Posted by Dave Haynie on 17-Dec-2001 15:40 GMT | In reply to Comment 35 (Steve): > It, pci/agp is not an alternative .
It's not an alternative, it's THE alternative.
> There aren't any Agp slots except on a few cards.
AGP is for graphics cards, plain and simple. Don't want/need graphics expansion, don't put an AGP card in your new system.
> So right there these weak idea is still behind the times in the pc world.
> That world is stil behind the tech times.
Well, it's either "the world" or "you" behind "the tech times". Care to venture a guess at which one?
> The pci/agp solution didnt get to where it was today becasue of it being
> better. It got there becasue it was set to open source by IBM.
Nope. PCI became the standard because it was better. Period. IBM had nothing to do with it, it was developed by Intel, and spun off to an independent group, the PCI-SIG. In fact, PCI unseated the "VESA Local Bus", or VL-Bus, which many companies, including IBM, were promoting as a sort of follow-on to the ISA bus. VL-Bus sucked bigtime, it was basically just the '486 bus signals extended to an expansion connector. PCI is wholly CPU independent, very well thought out, fully autoconfiguring. It deserved to win.
AGP won out for graphics cards because it built on the already-successful PCI, and it went much faster. That's all that was necessary.
> It was orginal on thier mainframes.
Just what have you been smokin' there, pal? Nothing from the IBM mainframe world has been used in the PC world. Nor should it have been.
> AMIGA and Atari didnt open source thiers. If Amiga and everyone else had ,
> AMIGA would still be way ahead.
Huh? You're talking about an expansion bus. There's no issue of "opne source" here, there's no source, period. Intel didn't open up and share their PCI designs, they simply published the specs, granted free use of any related patents for building PCI gear, and spun control of the PCI bus out to independents so no one would be worried about Intel messing it up.
Commodore didn't drop control of Zorro, but it was certainly open, in the sense that anyone could make a Zorro II or Zorro III bus, if they so chose to implement a controller. But Zorro II/III were basically a generation behind PCI; contemporaries of the ISA and EISA bus, not of PCI. The difference is important. In the earlier times, it was assumed you would be building a bus controller from a handful of TTL chips, PALs, etc. In more modern times, the assumption is that a single chip will handle the whole bus interface. ZIII would certainly have benefitted from a single chip implementation (planned for the never-built "Acutiator" architecture), but didn't demand it. PCI demands it, and as a result, benefits from the performance inherent in such a design that doesn't have to consider more primitive implementations.
-Dave |
|
List of all comments to this article (continued) |
|
- User Menu
-
- About ANN archives
- The ANN archives is powered by #AmigaZeux. It was updated daily (news last: 22-Oct-2004; comments last: 18-May-2005).
ANN.lu was created, previously owned and maintained by Christian Kemp, www.ckemp.com.
- Contribute
- Not possible at this time!
- Search ANN archives
- Advanced search
- Hosting
- ANN.lu was hosted by Dreamhost. Sign up through this link, mention "ckemp" as referrer and he will get a 10% commission on any account you purchase.
Please show your appreciation for any past, present and future work on ANN.lu by making a contribution via PayPal.
|