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Home▸ Forums▸ 68kMLA▸ 64MB EDO RAM in a Color Classic II/ LC550 — #4
Post #4 by trag
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryHardware
Post DateTue, 20 Apr 2010 - 19:51
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/64mb-edo-ram-in-a-color-classic-ii-lc550.20394/
Post
Your system can only use 32 meg SIMMs as two banks of 16 meg. Since 64 meg SIMMs are a single bank, you're just seeing memory in one of the two banks, hence 16 megs.
What John said.

A 32 MB 72 pin (32 bit wide) SIMM is two banks of 16 MB each. In order to address 16 MB which is 4 bytes wide (32 bits) the Mac must address 16M/4 addresses = 4M addresses. This requires 22 bits of address. The address is multiplexed into two parts, a row and a column. So your Mac supports 11 X 11 addressing. An 11 bit row address is sent to the memory chips, then an 11 bit column address and thence, some address amongst the 4M is found and 4 bytes are obtained from (or written to) that address.

And 11 X 11 is the most that that Mac model knows how to address.

A 64 MB SIMM is one bank of 12 X 12, or 24 bits of address which gives it 16M addresses with 4 bytes per address. But your Mac only knows how to address 22 of those bits, causing a "loss" of 2 bits or a divisor of 4.

A 128 MB SIMM would be seen as 32 MB, because the 128 MB SIMMs are 2 banks of 64MB, just like two 64MB SIMMs pasted together.

mp.ls