🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3257@tdbunews.teradata.COM> mhr@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com (Mark A. Hull-Richter) writes:
|> I seriously doubt that you could build any kind of irrefutable case for RISC
|> UNIX vs. a PC running DOS or UNIX.  486 and Pentium chips have made the risk
|> of using RISC higher (so to speak) as the parts for PCs are more widely and
|> inexpensively available by far than for RISC machines (and cheaper overall).

Speaking purely hardware wise now...

It is self-evident that RISC designs are generally
able to run faster and with less transisters (and therefore less heat
generated and less chances for design error) than CISC designs.

On the other hand, the very fastest CISC designs (Pentium, for
example) can still hold their own.


The real difference between machines is usually in bus design and
what's included in the base chipset.


If you don't care about i/o performance or networking so much,
get a basic PC.

If you want fast, inexpensive networking with reasonable i/o, a
workstation may be better.  There are Intel based solutions which I'd
qualify as workstations here, but in this catagory their peripherals
are no longer less expensive than those for RISC based workstations
(when you add the cost of ethernet and SCSI cards and consider that
many of these may be MCA bus based).

Above the workstation sized machine, the RISC based solutions start
having even bigger price advantages (though much of it is more because
the Intel based big machines are from companies which don't discount).


Final conclusion...It depends heavily on what you want the machine for.