Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: paul@walker.demon.co.uk (Paul Walker)
Subject: Re: [REQ] FAQ ? B004 ? D7205 ?
Organization: Paul Walker Consultancy
Date: Mon, 2 May 1994 09:07:04 +0000
Message-ID: <767869624snz@walker.demon.co.uk>

In article <west.2.00088F35@emt.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de>
           west@emt.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de "Robert Westendorp" writes:

>Just for interest:
>
>-- What are the 'fastest' Transputer - PC boards available?
>-- Who produces/sells them?
>-- What type of interface do they use?

Not sure which is fastest, but the following offer "16-bit" interfaces:

Alta, with thier Ultra/XL
Sundance, with their SMT012-2, which uses bus-master DMA and has
           twelve TRAM slots compared with the normal 10 slots
Transtech, with their TMB16, which uses the T2 to read the bus while 
           the 386 is writing to the bus, and vice-versa (This is
           a very clever design, using the T2 which controls the C004
           to do something a bit more useful as well. It uses 
           16-bit I/O, which some application notes say does not 
           work on all varieties of PC --- although I have never 
           heard of the Transtech board not working.)

The information from Alta does not describe the mechanism used.

The Transtech solution is probably the lowest cost, but
my own preference is for the bus master interface, because this
should not only give higher transfer speeds but also allows the
processor to be doing something else rather than the current transfer.

Expect transfer speeds of 3Mbytes/s or faster; The ISA bus is not 
supposed to give higher than 5Mbytes/s, so take any faster figures with
a pinch of salt --- although in special conditions and just 
considering the peak data rate, faster rates can be achieved.

Rather than the ISA interface, you might prefer to consider a SCSI
interface. Caplin, Sundance, Transtech offer SCSI II TRAMs with a 
variety of features and performance.

There may be other manufacturers who have equivalent products: the ones
mentioned are the ones for which I have data, and which I found 
during a quick scan through this data. 

Hope this is useful

Paul Walker

