VOGONS


First post, by root42

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The German Wikipedia page on the ISA bus lists these performance characteristics for the ISA bus:

16 bit: 5,33 MByte/s at 8 MHz (AT, 1 W/S)
8 bit: 1,33 MByte/s at 8 MHz (AT, 4 W/S)
8 bit: 0,96 MByte/s at 4,77 MHz (XT, 1 W/S)

I see that 5.33/4=1.33. Makes sense.

However, I would assume that at 8 MHz I can transfer 16MiB/s with 16bit wide data bus with no wait state or 8MiB/s with one wait state. Why is this only 5,33 instead?

Similarly: Why is the 4.77MHz PC ISA bus only 0.96MiB/s slow?

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Reply 1 of 5, by Tiido

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One bus cycle takes several clocks to complete on ISA. On older CPUs it is directly tied to CPU's own bus cycles which are 4 clocks long usually : ((3.579545 * 4) / 3) = XT CPU speed / (4 clocks per bus cycle + 1 wait state) = ~954545 bytes/second

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Reply 2 of 5, by root42

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Interesting info!

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Reply 3 of 5, by Tiido

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Another limiting factor is that CPU can only write one/two bytes at a time, and it has to fetch instructions between those writes too so actual theoretical figures are unreachable on stuff like the XT.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 4 of 5, by root42

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Sounds reasonable. Well, with 16 bit writes my 286 more or less gets the theoretical maximum when pushing simple data to the Tseng VGA card.

Also, I guess bus mastering cards would have been able to achieve this throughput.

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Reply 5 of 5, by Jo22

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Sounds indeed interesting! If I was nitpicking, I'd say that the PC/AT had no ISA bus yet, but an AT bus. 😉
ISA came later and capped the bus speed at ~8MHz. Before that standardization, bus speeds of 10 or 12MHz weren't that uncommon.
(That's why a few expansion cards from the mid-late 80s could go along with higher speeds, but several cards from the 90s couldn't.)

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