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From: tgoose@eng.umd.edu (Jason Garms)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: 486SX - Intel now telling lies
Message-ID: <1991Jun6.201631.10084@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 6 Jun 91 20:16:31 GMT
References: <1991May29.230433.10095@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu> <1991May30.164751.16585@thyme.jpl.nasa.gov> <1991May31.183111.16505@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1991Jun2.030215.11584@unixland.natick.ma.us> <1991Jun2.041512.29546@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (C-News)
Reply-To: tgoose@eng.umd.edu (Jason Garms)
Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity of Uniland, College Park
Lines: 31

In article <1991Jun2.041512.29546@leland.Stanford.EDU>, 
> SUN SPARC 2 doesn't offer as good as floating point performance as either
> IBM POWER line or the newcomer HP 9000 series.  The later is the newest 
> screamer on the block and from what I know (from IBM inside info) that 
> IBM Workstation Group is working overtime to try to top HP these days.
> (an IBM senior programmer told me that their face were green with envy
> these days seeing the blazingly fast X Window performance of HP 9000s :-)
> 
> I love this :-) Competition is always good for customers :-) :-) :-)
> 
> Later... 
> 
> Chin Fang
> Mechanical Engineering Department
> Stanford University
> fangchin@leland.stanford.edu

Just a point of notice for anyone who is interested. The Sparc 1, 1+ and IPC
all use a floating point chip designed by Weitek.  The new Sparc 2 no longer
uses a Weitek chip.  This could be why Weitek just came out with their own
Sparc 2 compatible board.

Also, for number crunching, RISC is always going to be much faster than CISC.
This is why many printer manufacturers are talking about going over to RISC
processors in laser printers, and RISC chips are so common on graphics
accelerators.

Jason Garms
tgoose@eng.umd.edu

P.S.  Have you seen the new HP/Apollo workstations?  Now there's fast!