New Agilent Scope--Unexpected deficiency

[The Electrician]

I got an email from Agilent about their new 9000H series scope with 12 bit vertical sampling:

http://www.home.agilent.com/en/pd-2227294-pn-DSO9024H/high-definition-oscilloscope-250-mhz-4-channels?nid=-33085.1042675&cc=US&lc=eng

But check out the waveform update rate on page 13 of the data sheet:

http://cp.literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/5991-1520EN.pdf

Only 2k waveforms/sec?  After all the noise Agilent makes about the importance of this capability in a modern DSO?

[free_electron]

nah. it can do up to 250K waveforms per second.
see the full details. update rate changes depending on what mode you are in.

[The Electrician]

Page 23 of the data sheet shows that the 250k waveforms/sec only applies to segmented mode.  Look at the real time mode specs on that page.

Agilent makes much of the fact that the update rate of the 5000 and 6000 series scopes remains nearly constant at about 100k waveforms/sec no mater what mode you're in.  Why for this new and very capable scope would they not consider a high update rate in all modes worth doing?

[free_electron]

Probably because of the 12 bit convertor and the low noise floor... Dunno. Ask them.

[jahonen]

My guess is that scope is based on Windows PC platform, so no fancy ASIC graphics processor for super fast rendering to display, like in x/5000/6000 series.

Regards,
Janne

[free_electron]

My guess is that scope is based on Windows PC platform, so no fancy ASIC graphics processor for super fast rendering to display, like in x/5000/6000 series.

Regards,
Janne

windows has no impact in the 9x series. they use the same fancy asics. they have a special graphics card with dual ported memory. the scope asics write the traces directly into video ram bypassing even the pci bus. agilent has been doing this on all their windows scopes since the infiniium series was born.

Windows is just there for network/printing and GUI. 
Besides , the 2x 3x and 4x machines are also 'windows' based. It's running on an Stmicro Spear-600 cpu. Windows CE that is. The older 6x and 7x series are vxworks based.

in the 9x series they run windows XP or 7 on a simple Celeron at 1.2 Ghz. they don't need more than that as it's just there for GUI. no scope processing is done on the 'pc' side.

[Wuerstchenhund]

My guess is that scope is based on Windows PC platform, so no fancy ASIC graphics processor for super fast rendering to display, like in x/5000/6000 series.

It most certainly has nothing to do with Windows, and besides, the rendering performance of those ASICs would have a hard time to keep up with GPUs under Windows that are more than a decade old.

1M wfms/s may be hot stuff on scopes, but it isn't for PC graphics under Windows or other operating systems.

[CarlG]

Since the 9k-series is capable of 250k triggers/s in segmented memory mode, I guess it must be be graphics that's the bottleneck for the update rate. The user's manual states that the display is updated for every trigger in real time mode, which of course severly limits the capture rate.

This is in contrast to the x/6k/7k-series where, if I get it right, the acquired data is preprocessed and reduced in the Megazoom asic before transfer to the graphics processor at a much lower rate than the trigger rate.

My guess is that they only upgraded the front end, not the graphics data processing on the 9000H (compared to the std 9k-series). But that's not much of an excuse for such low update rate in a new scope. Maybe it's enough for marketing point of view.

free_electron, are you certain that the Megazoom (III?) asic is used in the 9000k-series? It would make sense since the 9k came after the 6k/7k models (if I remember correctly). But obviously there's some fundamental difference in how they put the rest together...