Franklinstein
Well-known member
Try running a 68k version of MacBench on the 6100 and original 62xx for comparison. The only valid complaint against these machines is that 68k emulation suffered on the 6200 compared to its contemporaries or successor models, and if MB4 is a fat binary or PPC native you won't not notice the effect with a native PPC comparison with the 6100.
Nothing outside of supercomputers ran external cache at CPU speed, ever, at least not once CPU speed started to decouple from bus speeds in 1990-something. No way Apple was going to pay for 100MHz SRAMs for a bargain basement computer. If they could even get 100+MHz SRAMs in 1995, they would have put them in the 9500. Guess what? They didn't: the 9500 ran its L2 between 40 and 50MHz depending on processor bus speed. All Apple L2 caches ran at logic board bus speed until the 9600/300 and 350, which had specially designed processor cards that ran the onboard L2 cache at 100MHz (while ignoring the slower logic board cache), which is still far less than the 300/350MHz of the processor clock. Then of course there were the G3s and G4s with backside caches, and those never ran faster than 50% of clock speed, usually less. The whole point and largest benefit of an L2 cache is to have low-overhead SRAM memory (read: no refresh cycles required) available directly to the processor without having to go through/wait for other chips or narrower buses to get there. The 603 processor can only talk to external devices including L2 cache at logic board bus speeds, especially since not only is L2 directly on the 60x bus in these machines, but so is the ROM and Capella, and I guarantee none of those are capable of 100MHz operation.
As for a bottleneck between CS and LC PDS? I never said this was an exclusive problem for the 6200; it affects anything with Primetime including the Q630 and LC 575. Two networking cards could be problematic, if it was even possible to use legacy Mac OS simultaneously on two different domains or network types. Or CS Ethernet and a PDS video card. Or on the 575, CS Ethernet and a IIe card. It's not likely a problem anyone would encounter often, but there's the potential for degradation if both slots were active simultaneously, especially since they're both only 16MHz slots that may share the same '030 bus (the dev note isn't terribly clear if it's two '030 buses or one shared) and the Primetime has other things to do in addition to managing both expansion slots.
My point was that there were a few errors or omissions in the guy's page, not that every word he typed was wrong; its still better than the LEM BS.
Nothing outside of supercomputers ran external cache at CPU speed, ever, at least not once CPU speed started to decouple from bus speeds in 1990-something. No way Apple was going to pay for 100MHz SRAMs for a bargain basement computer. If they could even get 100+MHz SRAMs in 1995, they would have put them in the 9500. Guess what? They didn't: the 9500 ran its L2 between 40 and 50MHz depending on processor bus speed. All Apple L2 caches ran at logic board bus speed until the 9600/300 and 350, which had specially designed processor cards that ran the onboard L2 cache at 100MHz (while ignoring the slower logic board cache), which is still far less than the 300/350MHz of the processor clock. Then of course there were the G3s and G4s with backside caches, and those never ran faster than 50% of clock speed, usually less. The whole point and largest benefit of an L2 cache is to have low-overhead SRAM memory (read: no refresh cycles required) available directly to the processor without having to go through/wait for other chips or narrower buses to get there. The 603 processor can only talk to external devices including L2 cache at logic board bus speeds, especially since not only is L2 directly on the 60x bus in these machines, but so is the ROM and Capella, and I guarantee none of those are capable of 100MHz operation.
As for a bottleneck between CS and LC PDS? I never said this was an exclusive problem for the 6200; it affects anything with Primetime including the Q630 and LC 575. Two networking cards could be problematic, if it was even possible to use legacy Mac OS simultaneously on two different domains or network types. Or CS Ethernet and a PDS video card. Or on the 575, CS Ethernet and a IIe card. It's not likely a problem anyone would encounter often, but there's the potential for degradation if both slots were active simultaneously, especially since they're both only 16MHz slots that may share the same '030 bus (the dev note isn't terribly clear if it's two '030 buses or one shared) and the Primetime has other things to do in addition to managing both expansion slots.
My point was that there were a few errors or omissions in the guy's page, not that every word he typed was wrong; its still better than the LEM BS.