Slide 3 of 12
Notes:
The “Rocket” PIM was the next version of the PIM family, so named as the PIM processing engine resided on a Radius Rocket accelerator board. The Rocket PIM boards plugged directly into the NuBus slots of a Macintosh Quadra-class workstation, thus allowing the development environment and execution engine to live on the same workstation.
This version of the PIM was the first to feature a variable frame rate, or scan time. PIM execution time could be varied in an inverse relationship with number of cells available. For example, if speed were doubled, number of available cells were halved.
Though a number of Rocket PIMs were sold and installed, this version of the product had its shortcomings. The PIM execution hardware was dependent upon the stability of the Macintosh NuBus limiting the RocketPIMs applicability in a mission-critical situation. Further, the RocketPIM had a limitation of 1000 processing cells. Though up to four boards could be placed in a Macintosh workstation, this limitation restricted scalability of the PIM.
This version of the PIM has since been phased out in favor of the latest configurations in the product line - the VME PowerPIM and the NT-PIM.
