Appian Technology Inc, Sunnyvale, California has come up with a high-speed means of linking 80486 processors to AT bus peripherals. The P928 FAST Local Bus Peripheral Interface chip is claimed to be the only part of its kind in the market, and links the local 80486 CPU bus to speed- critical AT peripherals including VGA graphics and IDE disk interface so that designers can use the full capability of high performance peripherals, which would otherwise hit a bottleneck on the AT bus. The P928 is claimed to improve performance by as much as 500% at significantly less cost than through discrete logic implementations, providing a 32-bit interface to the CPU bus, and supporting double-word read and write operations with the CPU through internal byte conversion and control logic. Fast AT cycles from the P928 are programmable in both wait-state and recovery time and it supplies logic for direct memory access. It is $18.83 for 5,000-up.
