🚀 go-pugleaf

	I've had some personal experience benchmarking the Pyramid
9820, so I'll try and comment on it here.

	The 9820 is a dual processor system, which measures at right
around 13 to 14 MIPS for the total system. (I'm using 1 MIP = 1 VAX
11/780.) The system includes arithmetic accelerators for both CPUs.
The system has a 64 Kbyte data cache and a 16 Kbyte instruction cache
per processor. The total system can be expanded to 128 Mbytes of memory
(fully accessible by both processors.) It uses a 40 Mbyte message based
bus to intelligent RISC based I/O controllers. The disk controller
(called an IOP) is capable of supporting 11 Mbytes/sec sustained
throughput with a 21 Mbyte/sec burst rate.  The TPE
(tape/printer/ethernet) controller also supports one of the highest
throughputs I have seen for either tape or ethernet (who cares about
printer throughput!). The ITP (terminal processor) is capable of
sustaining all 16 lines at 9600 baud, both output and input.

	The 9820 supports both BSD 4.2 and System V.2 under its "dual
universe" environment. (Refer to the sales literature for a full
description of this.)

	Entry level price for a 9820 with 16 Mbytes of memory, 32
ports, UNIX, a 470 MB disk, and a 1600 bpi tape is $309K.

	I would like to second Ron's comment that a few fast processors
is better than lots of small processors. Two reasons for this:  first,
if you have a single big process, having lots of smaller processors
doesn't help, unless the big process has been broken into smaller
processes.  Even with a mix of smaller jobs, queuing theory tells us
that if you have a system with n servers of speed 1, and another system
with a single server of speed n, given the same process mix, the system
with a single server will more efficiently process the queue. This is
even before we start worrying about contention for resources,
synchronization of processors, etc.

-- 

					eric
					...!ptsfa!hippo!eric