What happened to the P2 HyperFlash/HyperRAM board?
RossH
Posts: 5,762
in Propeller 2
I can no longer find the P2 HyperFlash/HyperRAM add-on board in the Propeller shop. Has this board been discontinued?
Ross.
Comments
Hmm, yeah, I'm not seeing it either.
It was designed to work with the P2EVAL, which got discontinued, so I guess it's gonzo now. External RAM doesn't really do well on the EDGE breakouts...
That bothers me. The Eval Board was a good design.
The HyperFlash/HyperRAM add on seemed to work ok on all my P2 EDGE Breakout and P2 Edge Mini Breakout boards. However, all my P2 Edges are P2-EC32MBs, which means they also have their own on-board PSRAM. Does that make a difference?
Ross.
TBF I never tried the Hyper board like that. EC32MB shouldn't really have better I/O routing than the plain one, so it shouldn't differ in performance. The on-board RAM is better than any add-on could be, of course.
The Mini Breakout's are best option for signal integrity but still not as good as the Eval. Glad to hear the Hyper add-ons work there.
But now you can't buy them, which seems a bit of a shame for those who bought the P2 Edge without PSRAM.
In the P1 days we had a wide choice of boards with external RAM, and also several add-on boards to choose from. I think this extended the life of the P1 because it allowed us to get around the 32kb limit, which made all kinds of things possible (and not just extra space for code execution).
But there currently seems to be only one option for external RAM on the P2, and that is the P2-EC32MB. Perhaps Parallax believes that no-one will ever need more than the 512k on the P2 - but then I am old enough to remember similar talk about 640k on the IBM PC, and can imagine what would probably have happened if people had taken it as gospel. Which is that PC manufacturers would have moved to a different chip - possibly the 68000. Which, come to think of it, might have been an improvement.
Ross.
I think (?) C3 was the only Parallax-endorsed P1 product that ever had external RAM. And that one works in kinda convoluted ways.
The EC32MB is a really good solution with great bandwidth and decent capacity. And many 3rd party P2 boards (eg from @Rayman or @MXX ) come with RAM, too.
Fast DMA makes external RAM on P2 much more useful than on P1. So I think it's a very good state of affairs. But don't ask me, I brought 96MB as a standard P2 PSRAM capacity (that's 12 individual chips!) into existence by pure strength of will. /j
Allegedly they (IBM) considered using the 68008 at some point, but chose the 8088 instead because ???. 68k is a much better architecture than 16-bit x86. 386 theoretically evened the playing field, but PC got stuck with that DOS/Win16 legacy for a while there (until WinNT became mainstream). Though classic MacOS also inherited some, uhh, cool cruft from pre-MMU 68k and they handled it like a million times worse, so who'se to say...
The C3 was a late addition. The Hydra (which was Parallax endorsed) was much earlier and it had a 512k add-on memory card. And there was at least one Parallax add-on card - the Propeller Memory Card - which could be added to almost any Propeller board. And of course, there were many non-Parallax offerings. We were spoiled for choice!
Now, that's willpower!
I agree the EC32MB is a good product, but there didn't seem to be any reason to discontinue the HyperFlash/HyperRAM board, which gave those who had purchased a plain P2 Edge (which Parallax still sells) an expansion option.
Who indeed? However, the C language would have had more popularity on PCs if Microsoft had not had to debase it with "near" and "far" pointers because of the crazy Intel 8086 architecture. Which would have been a good thing. C is, after all, still one of the most widely used language almost everywhere else (currently second only to Python according to TIOBE - but these "fad" languages come and go regularly, while C stays pretty much always first or second, and is quite often still in first place.
Ross.