Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!sun-barr!newstop!sun!eng.sun.com From: david@eng.sun.com (You'll feel good about yourself!) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: 386 machines are workstations? (Sun/386i) Message-ID: <136288@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 27 May 90 00:05:40 GMT References: <634@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> <6326@scolex.sco.COM> <638@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> <3383@auspex.auspex.com> Sender: david@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Lines: 17 In article bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes: >The problem with the window stuff was that just about everything went >thru a layer to byte-swap as the 386 had a different byte-order than >the 68k (and SPARC for that matter.) Not really. Only things which start out in big-endian bit order (fonts, icons, rasterfiles) get swapped, and they only get swapped once. In normal use very little time is spent in the byte/bit-swapping code. If you look at MIPS and memory bandwidth, a 386 class CPU driving a 1 Mb dumb frame buffer is pretty marginal. You have to tune the window system code very carefully to get snappy interactive performance, and this was never done for SunView on the 386i. -- David DiGiacomo, Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, CA david@eng.sun.com