Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!unix.cis.pitt.edu!pitt!vax.cs.pitt.edu!jonathan From: jonathan@cs.pitt.edu (Jonathan Eunice) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Snake Message-ID: Date: 27 Mar 91 20:32:24 GMT References: <69465@brunix.UUCP> Sender: news@pitt.UUCP Organization: University of Pittsburgh Computer Science Lines: 34 In article <69465@brunix.UUCP> cgy@cs.brown.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writes: In today's New York Times, there is an article about the new HP Snake line. The story places the low-end Snake (720?) at 57 MIPS, 55 Specmarks for $12,000. This will obviously cramp the digestion of competing workstation makers. Yep. HP's low end is apparently performance competitive with high end of IBM RS/6000 line (little better integer perf, not as good floating point, dramatically better X perf), and much better than even the highest-end workstations from Sun, DEC etc. Look for serious repricing, heavy discounting, and a i lot of worrying from competitors. Does anyone know how these numbers were achieved? Are they misleading in any way? Not really; just good engineering, running real fast. HP-PA is a pretty good RISC design, and they've tweaked it with some handy cache-usage optimizations and better floating point in version 1.1. The main win seems to be high speed CMOS fabrication -- 50-someodd MHz on the low-end, just over 65 MHz on the high end. Another win is large caches, which should be very handy indeed for X, GNU, and other poor-locality-of-reference software, not to mention large data sets. These machines are more-or-less workstations, with workstation-sized I/O capacity. So, how they will compare to SMP machines and "real" minicomputers on throughput-oriented jobs is still in question. But, their CPU performance looks excellent.