🚀 go-pugleaf

> In article <15445@auspex-gw.auspex.com> guy@Auspex.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
> >Hmm.  As I remember, somebody from DEC at a session on topics such as
> >OSF/1-on-MIPS on Tuesday night at the San Antonio USENIX claimed that
> >HP-PA was "out of gas"; anybody know what his response to the above
> >figures are?
> 
> He would have known about the 7100, although not its exact SPECs.
> So, he's not *too* surprised.
> 
He was probably the same DEC marketing dwid who said last year that
HP was "up against the ceiling" in performance.  We "just took old
technology and pushed it to the limit."  Well, it worked last year and
it worked this year.  Anybody want to bet against us next year?

When are marketeers going to stop projecting the limits of what engineers
can do, and just let us get on with doing it?  Get over it, people.  Stop 
predicting who's out of gas and look forward.

> What he may have meant, is that HP won't be able to use offchip
> primary cache much longer. That was difficult at 66 MHz, and is
> really impressive at 100 MHz. Even HP can't do it at 200 MHz, surely.
> 
Surely.  Or not.  If it's the right thing to do, you can bet we'll do
it.  

> DEC's architects also have a low opinion of HP's high semantic
> loading. That is, HP has instructions that also do some second thing -
> such as skip-on-condition. The Alpha team avoided that, and have
> handwaving arguments about how this will help in future "aggressive"
> implementations.

You did an excellent job of explaining why the junior architects' club
doesn't design VLSI chips.  They can sit back and handwave all they 
want, but the proof is in the product.  

Can't anyone understand that the 21064 and the 7100 aren't blazing fast
because the architectures are great, but because the engineering was
great?  I'm sure the Alpha design team could have built a MIPS 
architecture chip that performed just about as well as Alpha if it
suited their purposes.  

Craig Gleason
* my opinions, not HP's