🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8909191352.AA03741@tpot.tn.cornell.edu> braner@TPOT.TN.CORNELL.EDU (Moshe Braner) writes:

>The main cost factor would be your RAM requirements.

That has always been the case, and will continue to be the case for
some time.  CPU power is relatively cheap; large memories are not.

>That $1000 price for the PC host is a bit unfair if you need more I/O
>capacity, etc.  You may want a $3000 386-based host.  But that's
>still relatively cheap.

And the I/O capability doesn't scale as the CPU power does.  Compare
the ratio of CPU power to I/O bandwidth for an XT and a wizzo 386 box
and you'll see what I mean.  Too may people seem to look purely at CPU
speed and not enough people seem to look at overall system
performance.  Why is the Logical Systems C compiler for the transputer
a cross-compiler?  Because passing the compiler and the source files
over to the transputer is slower than using the PC to do the
compilation locally.

>But what will happen when the m88000 and i860 drop in price, as is
>bound to happen some day?

Prices for these new boards will probably be dictated by RAM prices,
just like other boards.  If you are hanging one of these boards on a
PC, then you *need* a lot of memory to compensate for the host's poor
I/O speed.  (Try running a virtual memory system from a RISC board via
a PC disk!).  Look at the numbers for a typical RISC machine: $400 for
the CPU, $300 for the caches (quite a variable cost), and $3000 for 16
MB of RAM.  That's just raw chip costs, without counting board space
and power consumption.

Follow-ups have been redirected to comp.arch, as this discussion seems
to be more general than just transputers.

-- 
Hubert Matthews      ...helping make the world a quote-free zone...

hjm@cernvax.cern.ch   hjm@vxomeg.decnet.cern.ch    ...!mcvax!cernvax!hjm