Re: Centris 650: buildd candidate?
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 04:12:11PM -0500, Joel Ewy wrote:
> I recently hauled a couple carloads of computer junk away from my old
> college, ranging from 68030 macs to Athlon 1700XP+ systems, plus WiFi
> gear and lots of other stuff. One of the things I received was a
> Centris 650, which is a 25MHz 68040. The CPU speed isn't all that
> great, but it does have 4 72-pin SIMM sockets and I was able to get it
> up to 136M, which is pretty good for a machine of this age. I have a 9G
> SCSI drive with a 50-pin connector. The guy from the college said they
> had lots of trouble with those 9G IBM drives, so I don't know if it's
> any good or not, but should be useful if it works.
The extra RAM is good for builds. However, the SCSI performance on these
systems hasn't always been particularly good. I think Finn got the PDMA
working which should improve the disk throughput. Even the fastest real
68k hardware would only have about double or triple the real CPU power
of that system, but some of them have much better disk I/O. It might
be worth seeing how long some compiles take just as a comparison.
The first step would just be to get a system installed on it. After
that you can try out things and see what works well. Maybe try a
kernel compile or something to see how well it runs and let us know
how long it took for a standard configuration.
Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com
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