From: hsu@pix.com (Dagwood Splits the Atom)
Subject: Re: Who makes VESA local bus motherboards?
Organization: Pix -- The company with no adult supervision.
Distribution: usa
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 07:10:16 GMT

In article <m_1yrl+@rpi.edu> gilem@aix.rpi.edu (Michael R. Gile) writes:
>In article <Bu2soo.LKH@news.cso.uiuc.edu> jas37876@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (John A. Slagel) writes:
>>>So, does anyone know if there are any VGA cards for local bus with a
>>>*real* 32 bit data path?

...and a normal, flat, address space?  I'm also in the hunt for a suitable
workstation-class PC and it's made for one hell of a research trip.  Doesn't
anybody make a modestly-priced video controller that has a decent analog
subsystem?  Nearly all of the ones I've seen look like crap at a paltry
1024x768, compared to just about any garden-variety workstation built in the
last 5 years.  Just how fast are these Sierra RAMDACs, anyway?  Do the drop-
in replacements from Brooktree behave any better?

>  Currently there are only a few vendors which make
>such motherboards.  Micronics (who chaired the VESA commitee, and
>sell motherboards to Gateway), Zeos, and another company who's name 
>escapes me at the moment.

I have here the glossy on the Micronics VL-bus motherboard, and a few
details in its design give me reservations.  Namely, the entire memory
subsystem appears to use oddball SIMMS; the main memory is needs 36-bit
ones on a 70-pin carrier, whereas I was under the impression that 72-pin
carriers were prevalent in this size.  It's probably not worth wondering
what engineering decision resulted in a 12-chip SIMM (as depicted in
their photo) instead of 9 chips.  The cache subsystem is available in
two sizes, 64k and 256k, but again these are mounted to an even longer
SIMM, which pretty much ties you to whatever speed (and price) parts
Micronics sees fit to ship.  Somebody, please tell me that my concerns
are unfounded...

I noticed in one of Ken Germann's blurbs that Zeos is also going with
36-bit SIMMS...how many pins are they using?

Just for the record, assuming that this really is the VL-bus that Computer
Shopper reports was unanimously approved at the last VESA meeting and not
another case of marketing hype, it looks as though they've gone with an
EISA-type connector with one slot key, about 2/3 the length of the full ISA
connector and placed right next to it.  Looks a lot like what V-COM is
currently using, but I'm not certain about that.  The board also sports a
169-pin OverDrive socket, and on-board I/O consisting of 1p2s, a 2.88
floppy controller, and some sort of new IDE controller sitting on the VL-bus.
Nobody I talked to had any sort of pricing or availability information yet,
but then again, I didn't call Micronics directly.

Requisite non sequitur:

>> John A. Slagel     "My old man used to tell me, before he left this
>> j-slagel1@uiuc.edu  shitty world, never chase buses or women- you
>>                     always get left behind." -The Marlboro Man

And was anybody surprised that the Marlboro Man died of lung cancer two
months ago?

-dave

-- 
Dave Hsu                           <hsu@pix.com> -or- <hsu@eng.umd.edu>
Caffeine and Salsa Czar	          "Technology is like fish -- the longer they
Pix Technologies Corporation       stay on the shelf, the less desirable they
Have nerds, will telnet.           become."    - Andy Heller