June, 1992_MacUser_Accelerators_Compared

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Here's another addition to my tortoise-paced compilation of content for the Scan DUMP Projects:

Companion Piece: Accelerator Comparisons: July 1991 MacWorld

Enjoy! [] ]'>

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Ha, an i860-based Rocket!

 

[Gorgonops]

The Quadra 700 upgrade motherboard cost $3499!?! Wow. Just... wow.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Notice, they're only reviewing the 25 MHz Radius Rocket!

My 33 MHz Rocket w/32MB on its own FSB, simply blew the doors off any Quadra.

With a PDS mounted Fast SCSI II Card driven fast HDD it'd likely bitchslap my 840av! }

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The Quadra 700 upgrade motherboard cost $3499!?! Wow. Just... wow.

That translates into a Rocket 33, a SCSI II Daughtercard/HDD and a metric crapload of RAM!

 

[bbraun]

Maybe I missed it, but this seems like they're using the Rocket 25 as an accelerator, not standalone through RocketShare? I guess RocketShare started shipping in August 1992, but their pre-RocketShare Saturn V extension was available at the time of the review AFAIK.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The Rocket shipped with RocketWare for use as an accelerator. RocketShare was released a bit later, and was for using the Host CPU and any additional Rockets in a Multiple Processor Configuration, running Appletalk over Nubus. The later 40 MHz Stage II Rocket Models required RocketShare to function at all, they were no longer able to act in an acceleration only mode.

IIRC, Saturn V was the massively parallel processing Rocket hardware platform (more of a Raster Image Processing Array than an actual computer from what I've been lead to believe) that was headless and run from a "lowly" SE/30, whose ROMs were copied to each of the many Rocket's RAM under the Apple/Radius license.

I wasn't aware that Saturn V was ever a shipping product, just a prototype that had Apple crappin' a bucket full-o-brass wheaties when they saw it in action. Hence, Apple's intentional borkage of AppleTalk over NuBus.

But, I have been known to be wrong about this kinda crap though!

p.s. Interesting note: the review states that the Rocket was incompatible with the IIfx.

Whatcha' got to say about that tidbit, IIfx? :lol: I'll wager later versions of the Rocket's ROM fixed that issue nicely!

 

[bbraun]

I dunno, I was just going off old infoworld and macworld articles from '91 & '92 that I found while checking the release date of RocketShare (which appears to be 2 months after this article was published). I could be misinterpreting. Google books is giving me fits right now, but...

InfoWorld October 21 1991 article titled "Apple's latest products get third party support" describes "Saturn V, the System 7.0 enhancement, lets users add as many as four of the 68040-based Radius Rocket boards to Apple's Quadra 700 and 900."

Then Macworld Volume 9 from 1992 has an article describing the newly released RocketShare, saying it was formerly called Saturn V.

Anyway, I didn't mean to derail the discussion onto rockets, I was just curious which mode they were benchmarking the Rocket in. It looks like regular RocketWare, as an accelerator instead of as a separate RocketShare instance. RocketWare seemed to cause me a ton of incompatibility and stability problems with my Rocket 25i in a IIx. RocketShare is totally the way to go.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

No derailment possible! This thread is about Accelerators!

I had the opposite experience, RocketWare was fine, as was RocketShare, but with a lowly IIx at 16MHz as the only Proc to "share," it wasn't enough of a gain in productivity to bother to use, and actually sapped a bit of speed with overhead,.

Non-Rocketeers, please chime in with your Acceleration experiences.

More Accelerator Comparisons to follow, I've finally got a production setup that works . . .

. . . spread across three computers w/three different Operating Systems! :

 

[Bunsen]

Hey jt, much enjoying your scan dump posts. Is it possible you could gather links to all of them into a single thread, then maybe sticky that? Or maybe a wiki page. It would make a handy jumping off point to all this documentation.

Also, where are you hosting your images? I wonder if it might be a good thing to upload them to MLA instead/as well?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

PFFFTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Even I can't find some of them . . . :I

They're all direct links to my piccie hoard over on ImageShack. Backup seems to be a good idea, just in case I should ever repeat the Section 8/AWOL routine sometime in the future.

I don't Wiki, Flash, or do any social networking online anywhere but here . . . too many time sinks, too much to do, so little time!

This fall marks my 11th year without ANY TV, Commercial News or even Weather . . .

. . . BBC online whenever something sounds interesting at work, works for me, if the BBC don't care . . . **** 'it! }

 

[bbraun]

As kind of a random addendum to the Rocket train of thought, RocketWare is incompatible with the IIsi ROM. So if you've stuck a IIsi ROM in your IIx (or gotten one of dougg3's ROM SIMMs and have a IIsi based image in it) to get 32bit clean ROMs, the RocketWare INIT refuses to load and your Rocket becomes an awesome looking resistor.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

iCrap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The IIx is long gone, I wanted to put the Rocket into my IIsi! :-/

Where'd you pick up THAT IIsi specific corollary to Murphy's Law of Rocketry?

I do have one of the pre-pirate ROM SIMMs and am saving my pennies for ole' redeyes.

Hopefully a IIci, IIvx, or some other insane ROM SIMM swap will boot my IIsi into RocketWare Nirvana.

Does RocketShare work with the IIsi? :?:

 

[bbraun]

My setup is two 25i's in a IIx with dougg3's ROM SIMMv2 loaded with a IIsi image. The host is running System 7.1 and RocketShare 1.3.1.

The RocketShare extensions load and nothing complains. Mission Control launches, but everything takes an exceptionally long time. Launching Mission Control is slower than usual, and launching one of the Rockets takes forever and then crashes presenting a Mission Status Report window saying the Rocket crashed during launch.

I'll mess with it a bit, create a new disk for the rocket, and see how it goes. Not so great so far though.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The IIx ROM/Mode32 run Rocketware & Rocketshare just fine and dandy under 7.0.1/Tuneup.

I did it that way with my Rocket 33 (mostly under RocketWare) through the Entire Quadra Era! I kept using it as a Plotter Server right on up through the 603e era, until the brand spankin new Graphite G4 DA made the P6360/Crescendo 466/1M available for that MOS.

IIRC, it takes 7.1 Pro for the proper care and feeding of the Radius Rocket.

 

[bbraun]

RocketShare 1.3.1 works with the IIsi ROM, my config was just incorrect in some way that has since been resolved.

But RocketWare 1.5 still refuses to load with a IIsi ROM, with a message saying the IIsi is not supported.

 

[Renegade]

Picture 06 is missing :-/

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

 

[LCGuy]

IIRC, Saturn V was the massively parallel processing Rocket hardware platform (more of a Raster Image Processing Array than an actual computer from what I've been lead to believe) that was headless and run from a "lowly" SE/30, whose ROMs were copied to each of the many Rocket's RAM under the Apple/Radius license.
I wasn't aware that Saturn V was ever a shipping product, just a prototype that had Apple crappin' a bucket full-o-brass wheaties when they saw it in action. Hence, Apple's intentional borkage of AppleTalk over NuBus.

I've never heard of Saturn V, but you're thinking of Skylab - the prototype they built that had something like 14 Rockets in it. From LEM:

"As far as Mac Prototypes go, one of the most glorious I ever saw was the Radius 'SkyLab.' That was the development name for the project we were working on. Radius at that time was an early Mac peripheral manufacturer. We had made a Mac II accelerator called the Radius Rocket.
"The SkyLab was a server with 14 NuBus slots and a power supply so huge you could do arc welding on the side with it. It also had fifteen 3-1/2" drive bays, and four 5-1/4" drive bays (for CD ROMs or optical drives).

"The idea was for it to be a dedicated Image RIPer for graphic houses. It never happened.

"I was a Radius employee from 1988 to 1997. The SkyLab box was just as I described: power supply, drive bays and slots. The processors were the Radius Rocket Accelerators. Each Radius Rocket contained its own 68040 Processor and six 72-pin SIMM sockets. The concept was that it would operate as a distributed processor. A render farm. Your computer would have a plug-in that would break down your tasks and divide it amongst the Rocket Processors.

"At the Time of development, we didn't have an agreement with Apple. Only after showing SkyLab to Apple did they have us sign a Licensing agreement. (This was before the PowerPC clones.) An interesting result of the licensing agreement allowed us to use the actual Mac ROMs, but we were forbidden to include a boot floppy. Which was fine, since the whole thing ran from a console application anyway. So we had a Mac SE/30 as the console, but it would run with almost any '020 Mac.

"Another stipulation of the agreement was that we could not actually come out and say we were using the Mac ROMs. This was because at the time DayStar Digital and a few others were working on accelerators, and Apple didn't want to look as if they were playing favorites.

"From what I remember it was possible to boot the whole shebang from a floppy, but for fear of God and Apple it was not pursued or ever mentioned ever again. Using the SE/30 or a Mac IIcx, the whole thing was run like a headless server. The ROM issue was handled by us loading the ROM image into RAM. I forget why we did that, but just another aspect of the goofiness."

-by Anonymous Former Radius Engineer