MPC500 ?

Hey, I'm thinking of buying the MPC500 but I had a question. I know you can use it with an external hard drive, but is it possible to install an internal one like the MPC1000? and does it use the same RAM as the mpc1000?

Base400 wrote:Hey, I'm thinking of buying the MPC500 but I had a question. I know you can use it with an external hard drive

No you can't. You can only use it with a CF card.

but is it possible to install an internal one like the MPC1000?

No.

and does it use the same RAM as the mpc1000?

I don't know anything about the 1000 or what ram it uses.

the 500 and the 1000 can hold the same amount of RAM. install a 256mb card cas it only reads half, thus, giving you 128mb.

there was some guy who thought he could hook up and external hd to the 500, but it never really worked out, and there would be no point cas it couldn't fit inside a 500 anyways. itd be like carrying around one of those mpc60 floppy disk readers with you.

namotu wrote:the 500 and the 1000 can hold the same amount of RAM. install a 256mb card cas it only reads half, thus, giving you 128mb.

I still don't understand this...I put a 128 kingston ram in mines and I got the whole 128 mb of ram available.

yeah i've heard that too. i'm relly not sure to be honest, but my 256 was only $30, so even if i paid for something not needed, its not a big deal.

cas when you buy Akai Brand mpc ram, it must also say 128, even though it supposedly only reads half. but regardless of how much it reads, the 1000 and the 500 have the same specs as far as RAM upgrades go.

you can install a 256mb ram but the mpc500 will only read one side of it which is 128mb. which is fine because it's a lot cheaper anyways. i bought mine for like $15 bucks.

they aren't using ddr ram I assume?

does anyone know the fsb speed of the 500,1000, and the 2500?

I don't think the MPC500 has a FSB because it has different architecture, the memory needs to be a 144PIN SODIMM module which is 100 or 133MHz SDRAM I believe.

http://www.mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=26775

there has to be an FSB, it has a cpu and ram, so it has an fsb.

Just because it has a CPU and memory doesn't mean it has a FSB. Not saying that it definately doesn't, but I was under the impression that Akai use Analog Devices SHARC DSP's for the MPC line, and a lot of these have dedicated memory controllers and peripheral controllers rather than conventional busses. That said, the memory will still be clocked at some arbitrary speed, of which I have no idea!

well possibly, but without an fsb, then I dont see how the cpu is communicating with the ram. there must be some kind of set of lines going from the cpu to ram, regardless of a memory controller.

Yeah sure there must be lines communicating between CPU and RAM, just not necessarily a traditional FSB architecture. From wikipedia:

The front side bus as it is traditionally known may be disappearing. Originally, this bus was a central connecting point for all system devices and the CPU. In recent years this has been breaking down with increasing use of individual point-to-point buses. The front side bus has recently been criticized by AMD as being an old and slow technology that bottlenecks today's computer systems.

It's a stupid pedantic point that has no relevance to this thread however, since I don't even know if it applies to the 500.

guyb wrote:Yeah sure there must be lines communicating between CPU and RAM, just not necessarily a traditional FSB architecture. From wikipedia:

The front side bus as it is traditionally known may be disappearing. Originally, this bus was a central connecting point for all system devices and the CPU. In recent years this has been breaking down with increasing use of individual point-to-point buses. The front side bus has recently been criticized by AMD as being an old and slow technology that bottlenecks today's computer systems.

It's a stupid pedantic point that has no relevance to this thread however, since I don't even know if it applies to the 500.

true, it is slower mainly because it is parallel. it takes a considerable amount of time a resource to sync the binary since each piece of data is sent simutaniously using each line on the bus. I think a form of serial transfer would be faster (which is proven with the model of sata. sata is much faster then pata (ide) because they can force the data through one line at any "pressure" they want)


side note:

would have been cool if akai put solar panels on the 500 so you could make beats with out wasting the batteries.

Nope, a parallel bus at the same clock speed and with the same profile connecting wire/track will be faster than a serial one. There may be some problems in synchronization due to bus skew but these are solved at design time, by keeping PCB track lengths equal and removing any sharp 90 degree turns etc. SATA300 is quicker than IDE, but its a much newer technology. USB2 is faster than a parallel printer port, but thats just because of the standard set when it was designed. A printer cable has the bandwidth capability to be much faster than a USB2 one, its just that there was no need for that ridiculous data transfer in 1990 since the biggest hard drives were about 100MB, and the hardware to support a standard like that would be prohibitively expensive. The same goes for IDE.

You can get serial memory, but its a hell of a lot slower than parallel addressed modules. Bear in mind that the i/o speed of a hard drive is incredibly slow when compared to a RAM module. You never get sustained transfer speeds from a HDD near the 133MBps limit of IDE.

What AMD were referring to when they criticised the FSB was having one bus to all peripherals and thus one global address space. This means that only one peripheral can only be used at once (excluding things like DMA and interrupts etc). With a point to point system, you still have parallel busses, but there would be one bus between each peripheral that needs to be connected. (This would be a bit overkill, generally its just the memor, cpu and maybe graphics etc that need such high bandwidth). This sort of scheme massively over complicates the PCB layout and design considerations, but can offer better performance.
Amen on the solar panels!

I hope guyb stays with this forum for a long time... even tho I don't really know what the hell he's talkin bout with all the techno mumbo jumbo lol, it's really good to have a expert on deck!