C128 vs Apple //e (the state of 65xxx parts)

[Dave Haynie]

>
> I burned out the 4mhz 65C02 in my accelerator over a year ago and bought
> a replacement off the shelf for less than $12 (single unit) it was a
> Rockwell chip but the supplier said GTE was available too at the same
> price, but he didn't have any in stock. Bill Mensch said more than a
> year ago that the parts WDC was shipping were all 4mhz (even when 1 or
> 2 mhz were ordered), I don't know who manufactured these parts, but you
> are right, WDC sends all of their fabrication work out.
>
> Rick

$12 is a hand-tested price. A production 2MHz part is less than $1.00 in
cost, that might be as much as $2.00 in single quantities. Production
4MHz 65C816 chips were started at around $8.00 a piece in large quantity
(8 MHz 68000s are around $5.00 in quantity), though that price will
certainly drop over the next year. About two years ago we go some parts
directly through WDC, 65C816 chips, and they were labeled "4MHz", but
they'd only run at around 500 KHz. The 4 MHz parts I have from GTE run fine
at 2.04MHz, and I see no reason why they couldn't run at 4MHz. But these
haven't been available for that long. I wouldn't expect to see 6MHz parts
for awhile yet, except for an occasional hand-tested 4MHz part; OK for
hobbying and high priced 3rd party add-ons, but nothing a large manufacturer
is going to base a production computer on. Also, a system running at 4MHz
will barely be able to use DRAMs. A 6MHz system will have to use static
RAM, which will significantly increase the system price; you pay much
more for memory than you do for the CPU chip.

--
============================================================================
Dave Haynie {caip,ihnp4,allegra,seismo}!cbmvax!daveh
"Techno-Hippie, heathen, designing evil computers"

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