Re: Why are TI Calcs so inferior?
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On Sun, 17 Nov 1996 04:33:56 GMT, tsaimelv@pilot.msu.edu (Mel Tsai)
wrote:
>On Thu, 14 Nov 1996 18:39:07 GMT, lcappite@sprynet.com (Goatboy)
>wrote:
>>I've been looking over the tech specs for all the TI calculators, and
>>I can't argue that these calculators are spectacular. They are the
>>most ingenious pieces of equipment for school use and such. However,
>>they're hardware is very inferior. The hard disk so to speak only is
>>about 30K.
>
>Totally different technologies. It's nonvolatile static ram. Regular
>computer ram (simms) is not the same, and it's not even close to a
>hard disk. Computer ram is a form of DRAM (dynamic ram), which uses a
>capacitor to store each bit. Static ram, on the other hand, uses
>(about) 6 transistors to store a bit. The latest chip manufacturing
>processes only allow for about 1 to 2 million transistors on a single
>chip, so that's why high-capacity static ram is so expensive. If
>someone were to come up with a way of making static ram as cheap as
>hard disks, a new age in computing would result because NO ONE would
>even think about buying the "slow" hard drive. Static ram can be kept
>intact on very low power, whereas dram requires refresh circuitry and
>takes up too much power.
You mean SRAM, the stuff used in caches. I always knew they were the
fastest RAM about in 1993, but are they still the fastest, or is SDRAM
and MDRAM faster? I mean MDRAM has a transfer rate of over 800MB/sec.
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