[Coco] General Memory Question about speed

[Mark McDougall]

Lazy wrote:

> Would upgrading the memory in a Coco 2 from 20ns to 10ns provide a
> noticeable difference in speed?

The Coco, with the 6809's synchronous bus, does not "wait" for the memory to 
signal that it is ready, but rather requires that the memory is fast enough 
to satisfy the system clock rate. Hence, using faster memory has no affect 
on the system performance.

This is not true of all systems, though memory tends to be synchronous. Some 
systems have programmable wait-state generators that must be configured 
correctly for the installed memory. Others use external circuitry (PAL etc) 
to provide "ready" logic for synchronous memory of a known speed.

In these systems, it is sometimes possible to increase system performance by 
using faster memory.

Regards,

-- 
|              Mark McDougall                | "Electrical Engineers do it
|  <http://members.iinet.net.au/~msmcdoug>   |   with less resistance!"