🚀 go-pugleaf

>In <1990May27.101258.24470@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>, xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:

>>The Amiga 3000 is capable of holding (at least supporting) much more memory
>>than a Cray 1, and the size of gates in modern memory is much smaller and
>>thus they are more susceptable to alpha radiation induced parity errors than
>>were the gates of the Cray memory.

	I think you're making a pretty tenuous comparison here.  I could be
wrong, but I don't see suns or the like using ECC (I'm not even certain all
of them are using parity).  I don't see that the marketplace has shown it
to be important for desktop machines in the sun/whatever class, let alone
the low-end sun/high-end amiga level.

>>To take an Amiga seriously as a commercial machine in the "workstation,
>>large memory" market, I'd guess error correcting code will turn out to be
>>vital.  It would be a shame to have a big production run of the hardware
>>installed and on the street, only to have parity problems give the machine
>>a reputation as an unreliable machine, to be avoided in droves.  Better if
>>the problem is solved before the reputation is besmirched.

	I think ECC is one of our less important problems at the moment.
If people care, they can drop in an ECC memory card (cpu slot for max
speed or Z-III) and put all their fast ram there.  An opportunity for 3rd-
party hardware companies - or it would be if anyone cared about ECC, which
they (for the most part) don't.

>Right.. ECC is not parity, and vice versa. Parity checking is totally,
>completely, and utterly useless.

	Yup (or very close).

>>But then, what do I know after 29 years in the field about what people who
>>buy the machines look for in a large processor?  My computer purchases were
>>limited to a couple of million bucks worth, down in the noise level in the
>>marketplace.  ;-)

	Amiga's are "large processors", then?  ;-)  BTW, Commodore just sold
about $10M of Amigas to the government (as reported in WSJ, I think).  We
(as part of a Sears business center deal) won a subcontract for supplying
multitasking computers to the government.  Apparently this is suprising, since
we've only been trying to sell to the government for 6 months, and many firms
don't make sales for 18 months, due to long product cycles.  (Taken from the
WSJ article, not anything internal.)

-- 
Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering.
{uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup@cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com  BIX: rjesup  
Common phrase heard at Amiga Devcon '89: "It's in there!"