16 MB Memory Board



128 MB Memory Board

K-bus was essentially designed around timing for the DRAM-based memory boards. It even included a transaction to cause all memory boards to refresh. When I designed the monochrome frame buffer I briefly considered storing data in memory and DMA-ing it in a real-time fashion to the screen. I thought 108 MB/sec was a huge number. At the highest resolution of 1600 x 1280 pixels I would have needed less than 20 MB/sec for a 72 Hz refresh rate. It would have been a terrible design mistake because we needed every MB/sec we could get for the CPUs. It was an idea ahead of its time.

A company in Texas actually reversed engineered a Solbourne memory board and began selling clone boards. Solbourne eventually reached an agreement with this company and they produced a 1 GB memory board for Solbourne which sold for a phenomenal amount of money.