Turbochannel was a proprietary computer bus used by DEC in the majority of the MIPS-based DECstation line, some of the later VAXstations, as well as some early Alpha AXP-based systems. DEC abandoned use of Turbochannel in favor of the PCI bus around the mid-1990s.

Turbochannel shared many similarities with other proprietary local buses from the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as Sun Microsystems SBus and IBM's MicroChannel architecture. It was a 32 bit bus and came in variants between 25 Mhz and 12.5 Mhz, which had about 100MB/s to 50MB/s bandwidth.

All Turbochannel cards had their ROM in MIPS assembler, so the systems with another CPU used a small MIPS emulator in their boot consoles.

External links

• Shows interior of a computer using the Turbochannel bus

DEC hardware | Computer buses