Newsgroups: comp.arch Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!alfred!greg From: greg@organia.sce.carleton.ca (Greg Franks) Subject: Re: Can old architectures run fast? In-Reply-To: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu's message of 6 May 91 22:04:29 GMT Message-ID: Sender: news@ccs.carleton.ca (news) Organization: /home/organia/greg/.organization References: <8283@uceng.UC.EDU> <7628@auspex.auspex.com> <8324@uceng.UC.EDU> <1991May05.174756.9026@iecc.cambridge.ma.us> <8346@uceng.UC.EDU> Date: 7 May 91 10:27:22 In article <8346@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) writes: In article <1991May05.174756.9026@iecc.cambridge.ma.us> johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us (John R. Levine) writes: >In article <8324@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) writes: >>Are we likely to see the fastest CPU in year X being able to run, >>without change, a binary program more than 5 years old? ... >Well, there's always the IBM 360. You can still run 1965 vintage 360 >binaries on IBM's latest 3090 mainframe. That is truly impressive, in fact, it's rather astounding. But I see I left cost out of my question. So let me try another wrinkle: How does a 3090 stack up against modern workstations on the usual measures of performance/price, such as SPECmarks/$? My guess would be that the large backwards compatibility comes at a price. Also, how much slower and/or more expensive is the 3090 as a result of maintaining such backwards compatibility? (I realize that might be hard to get a handle on.) However, people who purchase IBM 3090's are not interested in SPECmarks/$$ because they are more interested in MBytes/second of transfer from the disk farm to the CPU and back. Most workstations of the SPECmarks/$$ fall flat on their face when it comes to I/O systems. (They also want to run five levels of emulation so that their anchient accounting program doesn't have to be changed :-) -- Greg Franks, (613) 788-5726 | "The reason that God was able to Systems Engineering, Carleton University, | create the world in seven days is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6. | that he didn't have to worry about greg@sce.carleton.ca ...!cunews!sce!greg | the installed base" -- Enzo Torresi