🚀 go-pugleaf

>In article <1993Jan19.122854.22863@jyu.fi>, HOUGHTON@jylk.jyu.fi (DAVID HOUGHTON, LK) writes:
>	c) SUNs are not the way to go

while SUNs might not be the way to go (SPARC is way behind the RISC curve),
i would put HP up against DEC any day. the PA-7100 chip can easily outperform
the alpha running at a much higher clock speed. considering that an under $50k
HP 735 turns in SPECfp92 of 150 while the $316k DEC 10000 (at 200 MHz) does
only 200 seems like the 21064 is a weak implementation of the basic Alpha
architecture (which does have some interesting aspects). HP is even better
with DP Linpack (40.8 MFLOPS vs the 10000's 42.5 or so). also the 1000x1000
Linpack for alpha is actually lower than HP's (based on DEC's numbers in
the november announcement). this tends to tell me that the tiny on-chip
alpha caches and high latency off-chip cache is weak. also the fact that
I/O busses off the chip run at most half the system clock speed does not
help much either. i would expect a 200 MHz chip to get at least 180 MFLOPS
on 1000x1000 linpack, if it were designed with technical (floating point)
computing in mind. i also think HP has a better graphics story than DEC,
though i am far from an "expert" in graphics.

it really boils down to wanting Unix or VMS, IMHO. since there are lots of
Unix vendors, there is more competition to get continuing improvements in
price, performance, price/performance, features, etc. since only DEC offers
VMS, they don't have as much of a need to continue improvements. while OpenVMS
claims POSIX compliance, i suspect many if not most people will write their
applications with non-POSIX facilities, making it difficult to port to Unix
(on which POSIX is based). and while there are extensions to POSIX on Unix
platforms, it is still generally far easier to port code between real Unix
boxes. i would think that if someone wants a real unix environment, they
would want something other than DEC (OSF/1) since alpha seems pricy for the
real performance you can achieve.

perhaps you should widen your search beyond just Sun and DEC.

just my opinions...

-bill
rosenkra@convex.com

-- 
Bill Rosenkranz            |UUCP: {uunet,texsun}!convex!rosenkra
Convex Computer Corp.      |ARPA: rosenkra@convex.com