Subject: Re: EISA/arc 100

From: Andreas Busse <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 93 17:34:06 +0200

> So anyone have an appoximate price of the Intel 82350 EISA chipset?

No, please can someone figure this out ?

> The Nec chipset can handle lots of buffered dma devices for on board
> goodies, but I believe the implementation of the arc 100 motherboard
> puts almost nothing on the motherboard.

What's about that famous ARC 150 board ?

> If things were on the motherboard why would they offer video, etherenet,
> serial, audio, mouse as seperate boards (actually designs for boards)?

Right.

> I don't have a good handle on the design time/difficulty moving the
> devices from the EISA expansion boards that come with the ARC 100 production
> kit onto the motherboard.  But the EISA bus is fairly fast/robust
> so I think it will be mainly a price and design effort consideration
> to decide were things like etherenet, serial, audio etc end up.

> We don't HAVE to implement any of the features, but then the cost
> of the ISA or EISA purchased seperately devices can add up.  For me
> personally the cost of the EISA adaptec scsi controller would make
> the system price prohibitive to me.

Even in the case we can't use the ARC 100 board *as is* it would be
a good design to start from. I doubt that adding on-board SCSI, ethernet,
video and so on will be more complicated than adding this stuff to our
good old 3081/3730 solution. I'm sure it will be easier because most
chips have an intel bus interface, which is provided by the ARC chipset.
But all this are estimates and guesses. As long we (I) don't have
exact documentation about the ARC motherboards, it's hard to say what's
possible and what not.
If it's true that NEC offers complete designs for the I/O boards it
shouldn't be that complicated to integrate that stuff on-board, either
on a faked EISA bus (saving connectors and separate boards) or directly
connected to the Adress/Datapath chips.

I believe I *must* have a look into my MIPS box. The more we're talking
about those stuff the more I feel that this machine is *very* similar
to the ARC design... (it should, then it is called "ARCSystem").
When I remember right, it has SCSI on-board, but everything else on
separate cards, including video.
Ok, I'll be off-line for some minutes...

Andy

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From: Bill Broadley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1993 12:08:08 -0500 (EDT)

> What's about that famous ARC 150 board ?

Well my impression was the ARC 100 board was for the 4000PC or 4400PC,
and the arc 150 was for the 4400SC and 4000SC.  So no difference
except a bigger cpu socket and cache chips.

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