Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!lll-winken!maddog!brooks
From: brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Evans and Sutherland quits the superbusiness
Message-ID: <39361@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 24 Nov 89 00:39:56 GMT
References: <1128@m3.mfci.UUCP> <1989Nov22.175128.24910@ico.isc.com> <3893@scolex.sco.COM>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lines: 36

In article <3893@scolex.sco.COM> seanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan) writes:
>for me to mention those, weren't you? 8-).)  As has been pointed out before,
>lots of people don't *need* 250 MFLOPS / MIPS on their desktop; they just
>need to shuffle data back and forth (that's why there's a TPS [Transactions
>Per Second] measurement; any commentary on that, John?  Michael?).  Without
No one needs a computer of any performance level on his desk.  What one
needs is a modern windowing terminal on a desk, connected to the
computer in the computer room with a connection of suitable bandwidth to
handle the drawing on the screen.  The Killer Micros and striped disk farm
belong in the computer room where fan noise and heat does not bother anyone.
A Killer Micro on ones desk is just a waste of a Killer Micro, along with
a uselessly small main memory size.  The utilization of such a machine is so
low it is hard to measure reliably.

>most "killer micros" is defficient because I can't do *real* DMA (it tends
>to steal cycles from the CPU).  (N.B.:  some K.M.'s *do* have *real* DMA.
>I'm waiting for them to come out with *real* I/O subsystems [using, say, a
>68000 as a PP].  Then they will scream, even compared to a Cyber.)
A 68000 is probably not fast enought to handle IO for a good killer
micro.  A real computer will have handful of Killer Micros hooked
up to a coherent cache system, with possibly VME DMA IO on the main bus
or some adapter attached to it.  A supercomputer will have a scalable
coherent cache system and some number of these caches hooked to striped
disk farms to supply the serious IO needs of such a machine.  Don't
confuse the basic CPU technology of Killer Micros with the really poor
main memory and IO systems which people sell as single user workstations.

>Some of the compilers available today are pretty amazing, especially
>compared to what was available just a decade ago.  The OS's running on most
>K.M.'s, however, tend to be unix varients (or, deity help us all, DOS).
>This is not a terribly robust OS, nor a terribly quick one (asynchronous I/O
>would be really nice; there are some other things that could be useful).
Killer Micros will soon dominate the world of computing, UNIX already does.
DOS users are not computing, but saying just what they are doing is not
appropriate for public consumption.
brooks@maddog.llnl.gov, brooks@maddog.uucp