Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!cliffhanger
From: cliffhanger@cup.portal.com (Cliff C Heyer)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: more soap box
Message-ID: <22308@cup.portal.com>
Date: 20 Sep 89 02:42:09 GMT
References: <21962@cup.portal.com> <1989Sep12.031453.22947@wolves.uucp>
  <22130@cup.portal.com> <1989Sep16.044013.429@wolves.uucp>
  <259@ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 58

Doug McDonald writes...
>I tried it on my Dell 310 with 150 meg disk.
>
>Reading a 3 megabyte file (copying to a 8192*7 byte buffer) 
>and doing nothing to the results resulted in 570 kByte/second.
>
>Copying the file from one disk to a different part of the same disk
>gave 440 kByte/second (after the divide by two).
>
>This is not stupendous, but then again is by no means 200kByte/second.
>

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!! FINALLY someone does a benchmark! Thanks DM.
Over the months I've posted requests in ibm.pc.collectionland
and *nobody* answers them! I can only conclude from the
few letters I've received that people don't want to know the 
awful truth about their I/O....

A VAX6000 equipped w/DEC's disks will do only about 600KB/s
*single user*, so your up there w/the big boys.

From my research, the Dell does come out on top in a great
number of areas so I would have to say it is a good choice.

Ronald Guilmette writes...
>>>I think that DG's AViiON workstations are going to make many people
>>>reevaluate how they want to spend their $$$.  The low
>>>end diskless node is < $8k.  This is probably CHEAPER than a similarly
>>>equipped Compaq or whatever. They use the VME bus, I think.  Onboard
>>>SCSI & ethernet also.
>>>
>>	Yes, they (IBM and DEC - and all the rest, including DG) will
>>save the bandwidth and fast i/o for the *big iron* machines AND the
>>high-end "workstations". 
>>
>That is probably a fair statement with respect to IBM and DEC, and is
>certainly a well known technique used for many years by IBM, but I think
>that it is very unfair to lump little DG in with those other massive
>monsters.
>
>I'm sure that DG (as an organization) does *not* feel that they have
>the luxury of being able to try to play these marketing games

That's why I said DEC & IBM in the first place. DG is the underdog that
will put out first class stuff to save itself. But don't get your hopes
up. As soon as their stockholders get a dividend they'll go back to the
same old tricks like the big guys.

The VME bus is a lower-volume higher-profit item. *But* you can be
sure I'm now going to check out DG!

DG disk-to-disk benchmark, anyone? (I'm hoping to start a trend here;
the *big iron* guys use MIPS as a trojan horse to hide the *real*
performance issue - "real world" I/O bandwidth. Lets blow their


cover!)
Cliff (hanger)