Press Releases Photon 100

APRIL 1998

CALIFORNIA GRAPHICS CREATES SUPER FAST MOTHERBOARD WITH 2MB L2 CACHE

One of the first 100MHz motherboard is ideal for upcoming AMD K6 3D

California Graphics has created the Photon 100 AGP motherboard to take advantage of all the improvements that Socket 7 is undergoing to deliver superb performance - the 100MHz front end bus, larger L2 cache and compatibility with exciting, inexpensive new processors such as AMD’s forthcoming K6 3D processor - but without the price tag of a Pentium II system.
"We expect this product to provide system builders world wide with the ability to produce high performance systems at prices that will really please their customers," explained Vincenzo Coccoli, Chairman and CEO of California Graphics. "We have addressed the twin bottlenecks of bus speed and secondary cache size with this new design. It offers a higher front end bus speed of up to 100MHz, which is nearly doubled the usual 66MHz, so that instructions really zip around the board and give much faster access to the L2 cache memory. The latter is also improved by the normal 512K of secondary cache being increased up to 2MB. This really turbo-charges the performance as the processor can have rapid access to much more memory stored in the cache rather than being slowed down waiting for data from the hard disk.
"The present price of Socket 7 processors is unbelievably low compared to the performance that they deliver. And there is a lot of life left in Socket 7 with manufacturers hammering out an additional common set of enhanced 3D graphics instructions to enhance performance, and AMD and Cyrix showing 300MHz versions of their processors with 100MHz bus speeds at the recent CeBIT show. Additionally, 350 MHz processors are already being planned!"
Price, performance and technology are developing in a very exciting way for Socket 7. With the Photon 100, California Graphics has created the ideal platform for systems based on this technology for business, home and gaming use. From the inexpensive PR200 processors to the next generation 300MHz ones and beyond, the Photon 100 provides a flexible foundation for systems combining excellent performance with outstanding value at only $140 (£85) per board with 2MB and $127(£77) with 1MB of L2 cache.

Board specifications
Quality switching voltage regulation, coupled with hardware CPU temperature detection, add an additional layer of protection against processor overheating and instability. This attention to detail and quality shows throughout the board design. Another example is the use of a bank of DIP switches for easy and quick configuration of system board voltage and speed settings, instead of fiddly sets of jumpers scattered all over the board.
California Graphics’ Photon 100 motherboard is based on VIA’s new Apollo MVP3 chipset with processor speeds of up to 450MHz being supported. Ample capacity is provided for new generation devices with five PCI slots, one AGP graphics slot and two USB ports in addition to two legacy ISA slots. Three DIMM slots take up to 768 MB of main memory that can be FPM, EDO, SDRAM or DDR SDRAM. The board is fully Year 2000 compliant with an AWARD plug and play BIOS, backed by a five-year warranty.

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