Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!apple!vsi1!bitbug
From: bitbug@vicom.com (James Buster)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 386 machines are workstations? (Sun/386i)
Message-ID: <1990Jun13.194117.16722@vicom.com>
Date: 13 Jun 90 19:41:17 GMT
References: <136288@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <6537@vax1.acs.udel.EDU> <11876@cbmvax.commodore.com> <2264@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <454@hitachi.uucp>
Organization: Vicom Systems, Inc.
Lines: 17

In article <2264@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
>In article <11876@cbmvax.commodore.com> jesup@cbmvax (Randell Jesup) writes:
>
>| 	God, 60% of a 17 VUPS machine?  I knew Unix window systems were mostly
>| horrible hogs, but that's ridiculous.

Much of the problem with the Sun 386i isn't the window system, it's the frame
buffer and disk I/O. On CPU-bound programs it was reasonably competitive with
the SPARC and Motorola machines, but the 386i was saddled with a very slow
frame buffer and slow disks. This is just as good a way to guarantee the death
of a machine as anything. Indeed, to be speculative about this, Sun had to make
the 386i a slow machine in order to spur sales of SPARC-based machines.
-- 
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        James Buster		(Domain) bitbug@vicom.com
  Mad Hacker Extraordinaire	(UUCP)   ...!ames!vsi1!bitbug
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