Re: Singapore Server Rescue

Bill Gunshannon schrieb:

Surely people here realize that comparing clock speeds is totally
meaningless. I doubt a 100 Mhz RISC system is functionally as fast
as an 80 Mhz VAX.

OK, we do not need to speculate, we can have numbers.
According to
http://tinyurl.com/2276u6
and
http://netbsd.nedmirror.nl/docs/Hardware/Machines/DEC/vax/
we have for the 1992/93 timeframe:

VS4000-90A 83MHz 39 Spec89
DEC 5260 60 63
DEC 3300L 100 60
HP 720 50 60
HP 735 99 147 !
IBM 350 42 74

so this is quite a collection of contemporary RISC machines with a
similar (or even lower) clockrate but significantly higher performance
than the (almost) fastest VAX.
The RISCs started where the VAX ended.

We can also go back further in time, 1990/91:

VAX 3100/76 30?MHz 7 Spec89
HP 425t 25 11
DEC 5120 20 16
IBM 320H 25 43

So there's not a single contemporary RISC a VAX could have beaten.
Even the 68040 based HP performs better.

It is likely that the 68K died because they opted not to be the one
used for the IBM PC (they did have first shot) and the sheer size of
the created market made Intel (which had one foot int he grave at the
time) a success instead of another blank page in IT history.

The 68K did quite well through the 1980s,
it was the chip of choice for any modern (i.e. non-PC)
computer, Apple,Amiga,Atari, most workstations, embedded, etc.
At the turn of the 1990s Motorola somehow lost the track,
the 68040 and the especially the 68060 were late to market,
and being just on par with intel wasn't enough for Apple
and the workstation makers.


.

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