Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!venera!rod
From: rod@venera.UUCP (Rodney Doyle Van Meter III)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 80-20
Message-ID: <10595@venera.UUCP>
Date: 16 Nov 89 21:08:58 GMT
References: <6927@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1989Nov12.020742.8838@utzoo.uucp> <1989Nov12.183132.3120@world.std.com> <6150@drilex.UUCP>
Reply-To: rod@venera.isi.edu.UUCP (Rodney Doyle Van Meter III)
Organization: Information Sciences Institute, Univ. of So. California
Lines: 42

In article <6150@drilex.UUCP> dricejb@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson drilex1) writes:
>
>From what I saw of the announcement, the 9000's are targeted at 'business',
>not 'scientific', applications.  If you really want to know that 80%
>set, I'd look at the output of VAX/VMS COBOL, plus any other languages
>they have now for transaction processing.
>
>There's a whole different world out there, which most Usenetters would
>have trouble even conceiving of.
>
>And that world is where the 9000s are targeted.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. I'm sure that's where their high-reliability
and transaction-processing marketing tacks are headed.

However, they're implementing vector instructions as part of the
VAX architecture. At some point, all CPUs without vector instructions
will be required to emulate them. Fortunately, that's one area
where DEC seems to do okay.

Do business applications use vector instructions? Doubt it. They're
pushing vector Fortran, anyway, just like everybody else, not vector
COBOL.

With four CPUs with vector processors, 512MB memory, and a few gig
of reasonably fast disk, it is supposed to peak at around 1 Gflops.
That's enough to keep a lot of supercomputer users happy, and it
has the "advantages" of coming with VMS, which actually is a
low-maintenance, relatively stable, multi-user OS, when compared
to some supercomputer OSes.

The kicker? The price tag, of course, just like always with a VAX.
Order of five million, list, for the decked-out box, plus HSCs
and disks. For that amount of money, you can get higher performance boxes.

Has anybody seen the vector instructions? They are memory-to-memory,
I assume? Does it include scatter-gather instructions?

I think this is a good move for the VAX guys. It may give them some
life for a while yet. 

			--Rod