• NCC-8570A crashes? Re: Scotty! We need LESS power NOW! [20MHz 8570-Axx?

    From Louis Ohland@21:1/5 to Louis Ohland on Sun Apr 23 07:34:27 2023
    Caffeine injection system must be lagging.

    85nS for 20MHz CPU
    80nS for 25MHz CPU

    8570A is hard coded to 2MB 80nS SIMMs.

    MAJ Tom, will we damage the Dilithium crystals in the NCC-8570A by down-clocking the 386 Power Platform to 20MHz? System is plodding around
    at 20MHz, will it be able to use the faster memory successfully? If we
    stoke up the boilers with 80nS, the BIOS will accept it, but will the
    memory controller be able to give us warp power with a clock 20% slower?

    Too fast to live, too young to die...

    Louis Ohland wrote:
    https://www.ardent-tool.com/8570/Planar_T3-4.html

    In an odd shift, maybe the 8570-Axx can be throttled down to a 20.0000
    MHz osc on the 386 Power Platform, giving us a system somewhat
    comparable to the Model 90 T0.

    Ramming the caffeine throttle through the stops to full war power...

    8590-T0 supports DBA-ESDI.
    8570-Axx supports DBA-ESDI.

    8590-T0 has a 386DX-20 w/64KB of screaming L2 cache..
    8570-Axx has a 386DX-25 w/64KB of screaming L2 cache..

    8590-T0 supports 4x 2MB 85nS FPM.
    8570-Axx supports 4x 2MB 80nS FPM.

    Snippet from T0 complex BIOS

    https://www.ardent-tool.com/trouble/badmem.html

    The -X- in the error-code can be any number, -S- marks the position of
    the memory socket, -Y- determines the module type, size and access-speed

    00021100 Configuration Mismatch
    00021110 J11/J1 0 - Parity, 4MB???, 80nS
    00021120 J11/J2
    00021130 J11/J3
    00021140 J11/J4
    00021150 J14/J1
    00021160 J14/J2
    00021170 J14/J3
    00021180 J14/J4

    Houston, we have a problem. Empirical evidence says 2MB works, and
    that's it.


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