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From: carroll@ssc-vax (Jeff Carroll)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.intel
Subject: Re: New supercomputer
Message-ID: <4079@ssc-bee.ssc-vax.UUCP>
Date: 6 Jun 91 07:00:29 GMT
References: <1382@ssdintel.isc.intel.com> <1386@ssdintel.isc.intel.com> <1991Jun5.185850.988@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: news@ssc-vax.UUCP
Reply-To: carroll@ssc-vax.UUCP (Jeff Carroll)
Organization: Boeing Aerospace & Electronics
Lines: 41

In article <1991Jun5.185850.988@leland.Stanford.EDU> izahi@leland.Stanford.EDU (Raul Izahi Lopez Hernandez) writes:
>   Can you mention an application that runs routinely both in the 386-33 and
>in the Delta?

	Sure. I bet csh has been ported to the Delta. They at least have a
csh workalike, for sure.

>   Applications that benefit from being run in supercomputers are never run
>in a PC (be it 386-33 or not), since the PC does not have similar memory or
>I/O resources.

	Untrue. I know lots of guys up here who are doing serious (albeit
laughable) numerical analysis on PCs, because they can't afford anything
bigger. Sure they could get results a lot faster on a Touchstone Delta. 
They'd also be able to do much more elaborate things than they're doing.
But supercomputers (even Intel's, which are a bargain) aren't cheap.

>   It is irrelevant to say that your LOTUS 1-2-3 spreadsheet would recalculate
>3000 or 6000 times faster since it would not be noticeable beyond 10 or 20
>times faster, because the spreadsheet is not big enough to even tax the 
>abilities or the new 386-33 or 486 based PCs in any business or home 
>application, while in engineering or the sciences serious researchers use 
>RISC based workstations.

	Well, maybe they do at Stanford. But I'm here to tell you that there
are a lot of serious researchers doing serious work on 386 PCs, on 286 PCs,
on anything they can get their hands on. I'm editing this on a 386/25 which
is the envy of everyone in an elite engineering group at one of the largest
corporations in America. Hell, even this is a step up. Four years ago I
was doing my engineering computing under CP/M.

	When Lotus gets around to porting 1-2-3 to Touchstone Delta, I for
one will have a job to use it on...



-- 
Jeff Carroll		carroll@ssc-vax.boeing.com

"...and of their daughters it is written, 'Cursed be he who lies with 
any manner of animal.'" - Talmud