And now for something completely different: Rehabilitating the Performa 6200?

The Power Macintosh 6200 in its many Performa variants has one of the worst reputations of any Mac, and its pitifully small 603 L1 caches add insult to injury (its poor 68K emulation performance was part of the reason Apple held up the PowerBook's migration to PowerPC until the 603e, and then screwed it up with the PowerBook 5300, a unit that is IMHO overly harshly judged by history but not without justification). LowEndMac has a long list of its perceived faults.

But every unloved machine has its defenders, and I noticed that the Wikipedia entry on the 6200 series radically changed recently. The "Dtaylor372" listed in the edit log appears to be this guy, one "Daniel L. Taylor". If it is, here's his reasoning why the seething hate for the 6200 series should be revisited.

Daniel does make some cogent points, cites references, and even tries to back them some of them up with benchmarks (heh). He helpfully includes a local copy of Apple's tech notes on the series, though let's be fair here -- Apple is not likely to say anything unbecoming in that document. That said, the effort is commendable even if I don't agree with everything he's written. I'll just cite some of what I took as highlights and you can read the rest.

• The Apple tech note says, "The Power Macintosh 5200 and 6200 computers are electrically similar to the Macintosh Quadra 630 and LC 630." It might be most accurate to say that these computers are Q630 systems with an on-board PowerPC upgrade. It's an understatement to observe that's not the most favourable environment for these chips, but it would have required much less development investment, to be sure.

• He's right that the L2 cache, which is on a 64-bit bus and clocked at the actual CPU speed, certainly does mitigate some of the problems with the Q630's 32-bit interface to memory, and 256K L2 in 1995 would have been a perfectly reasonable amount of cache. (See page 29 for the block diagram.) A 20-25% speed penalty (his numbers), however, is not trivial and I think he underestimates how this would have made the machines feel comparatively in practice even on native code.

• His article claims that both the SCSI bus and the serial ports have DMA, but I don't see this anywhere in the developer notes (and at least one source contradicts him). While the NCR controller that the F108 ASIC incorporates does support it, I don't see where this is hooked up. More to the point, the F108's embedded IDE controller -- because the 6200 actually uses an IDE hard drive -- doesn't have DMA set up either: if the Q630 is any indication, the 6200 is also limited to PIO Mode 3. While this was no great sin when the Q630 was in production, it was verging on unacceptable even for a low-to-midrange system by the time the 6200 hit the market. More on that in the next point.

  Do note that the Q630 design does support bus mastering, but not from the F108. The only two entities which can be bus master are the CPU or either the PDS expansion card or communications card via the PrimeTime II IC "southbridge."

• Daniel makes a very well-reasoned assertion that the computer's major problems were due to software instead of hardware design, which is at least partially true, but I think his objections are oversimplified. Certainly the Mac OS (that's with a capital M) was not well-suited for handling the real-time demands of hardware: ADB, for example, requires quite a bit of polling, and the OS could not service the bus sufficiently often to make it effective for large-volume data transfer (condemning it to a largely HID-only capacity, though that's all it was really designed for). Even interrupt-driven device drivers could be problematic; a large number of interrupts pending simultaneously could get dropped (the limit on outstanding secondary interrupt requests prior to MacOS 9.1 was 40, see Apple TN2010) and a badly-coded driver that did not shunt work off to a deferred task could prevent other drivers from servicing their devices because those other interrupts were disabled while the bad driver tied up the machine.

  That said, however, these were hardly unknown problems at the time and the design's lack of DMA where it counts causes an abnormal reliance on software to move data, which for those and other reasons the MacOS was definitely not up to doing and the speed hit didn't help. Compare this design with the 9500's full PCI bus, 64-bit interface and hardware assist: even though the 9500 was positioned at a very different market segment, and the weak 603 implementation is no comparison to the 604, that doesn't absolve the 6200 of its other deficiencies and the 9500 ran the same operating system with considerably fewer problems (he does concede that his assertions to the contrary do "not mean that [issues with redraw, typing and audio on the 6200s] never occurred for anyone," though his explanation of why is of course different). Although Daniel states that relaying traffic for an Ethernet card "would not have impacted Internet handling" based on his estimates of actual bandwidth, the real rate limiting step here is how quickly the CPU, and by extension the OS, can service the controller. While the comm slot at least could bus master, that only helps when it's actually serviced to initiate it. My personal suspicion is because the changes in OpenTransport 1.3 reduced a lot of the latency issues in earlier versions of OT, that's why MacOS 8.1 was widely noted to smooth out a lot of the 6200's alleged network problems. But even at the time of these systems' design Copland (the planned successor to System 7) was already showing glimmers of trouble, and no one seriously expected the MacOS to explosively improve in the machines' likely sales life. Against that historical backdrop the 6200 series could have been much better from the beginning if the component machines had been more appropriately engineered to deal with what the OS couldn't in the first place.

In the United States, at least, the Power Macintosh 6200 family was only ever sold under the budget "Performa" line, and you should read that as Michael Spindler being Spindler, i.e., cheap. In that sense putting as little extra design money into it wasn't ill-conceived, even if it was crummy, and I will freely admit my own personal bias in that I've never much cared for the Quadra 630 or its derivatives because there were better choices then and later. I do have to take my hat off to Daniel for trying to salvage the machine's bad image and he goes a long way to dispelling some of the more egregious misconceptions, but crummy's still as crummy does. I think the best that can be said here is that while it's likely better than its reputation, even with careful reconsideration of its alleged flaws the 6200 family is still notably worse than its peers.