While researching the RAM PowerCard, I found this:
Do you think this ever made it out of the lab?DayStar add-in boards outrun NuBus
FLOWERY BRANCH, Ga. -- Frustrated by the NuBus speed limit? DayStar Digital has found a way to break it.
Similar in some respects to the Direct Bus in Apple's SE and SE/30, DayStar's Extended CPU Interface, or XCI, lets add-in boards for the Mac II/IIx communicate with the Mac's CPU over an independent hookup.
"We're trying to move the Mac in the direction of the NeXT machine," said Andrew Lewis, president of the Flowery Branch, Ga., company. Lewis said XCI came as a direct result of seeing the distributed processing power built into Steve's Jobs' computer.
The XCI consists of an L-shaped board, with three direct slots and one for the Mac II/IIx's processor. The board plugs into the processor socket on the motherboard. As many as three specially designed XCI-compatible add-in boards, installed in the three NuBus slots closest to the CPU, can be plugged into the XCI backplane.
From the Mac's Control Panel, the user can choose to run the boards either over NuBus or over DayStar's interface, Lewis said.
XCI slots also are built into DayStar's $1,295 Extender II, a board that plugs into a Mac II's 68020 processor socket and gives the machine the processing power of a Mac IIx.
Bypassing NuBus lets XCI add-in boards run at the same 16-MHz clock speed as the Mac CPU, instead of the 10-MHz clock speed of the NuBus.
In March, DayStar plans to ship three XCI-compatible boards:
* Video XCI, a pair of eight-bit color video boards for 13- or 19-inch monitors. Lewis said the boards will be especially useful for graphics-intensive applications like animation or when scrolling complex images.
* HD XCI, a hard disk cache card that allows the Mac's processor to make faster transfer to and from SCSI drives.
* RAM XCI, a 16-Mbyte RAM card that works under the Mac OS as a high-speed RAM disk working at five to 10 times the speed of a mechanical drive, and under A/UX offers memory access more than six times faster than standard NuBus RAM boards, according to Lewis.
A version of the Video XCI for Apple's 13-inch RGB monitor will retail for $895, but no price has been set for the other XCI products.
Specifications for the XCI format are available to other developers for a one-time licensing fee of $100.