Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!fed!arccs2!m1phm02 From: m1phm02@fed.frb.gov (Patrick H. McAllister) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Single user vs. shared (was Re: Killer Micros and vectorized code) Message-ID: Date: 20 Mar 90 11:32:32 GMT References: <51771@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <100598@convex.convex.com> <52661@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <1990Mar18.023523.4034@ultra.com> <52817@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <1990Mar19.220617.26370@world.std.com> <782@cluster.cs.su.oz> Sender: news@fed.FRB.GOV Organization: Federal Reserve Board Lines: 25 In-reply-to: yar@cs.su.oz's message of 20 Mar 90 05:49:47 GMT It seems to me that an important consideration missing from the discussion up to now is display I/O bandwidth. My workstation has its display controller sitting in its backplane and can transfer graphics information to the display at bus speeds. I can't imagine that several users' graphical interfaces can be run across an Ethernet at what a Mac/PC/single-user workstation user would consider to be an acceptable speed. (Of course I don't know this for sure--I only know that the systems people here are recommending X terminals for users who don't do much graphics and single-user workstations for those of us who do.) It seems to me that the two main advantages of a single user workstation are predictable turnaround and high display bandwidth, and that users who currently have their own machines are not going to be happy with a shared one instead until these considerations are addressed. I can imagine an operating system for a multi-user machine that maximized responsiveness for interactive users instead of overall throughput (anyone remember VM/CMS :-), and it seems to me that providing acceptable turnaround need not require a single user workstation. Can anybody in netland speak to the other objective: can an X terminal talking to a remote host provide acceptable performance in running a graphical user interface like Motif or XView and running (moderately) graphics-intensive applications under it? (I think we can all agree that CAD requires a dedicated workstation, but how about 3D plotting of statistical data, WYSIWYG word processing with multiple fonts, and so forth?) Pat