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From: ken@njitcccc.UUCP (Kenneth Ng)
Newsgroups: net.arch,net.micro.att
Subject: Re: AT&T MIPS claim
Message-ID: <206@njitcccc.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 12-Jun-86 23:18:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: njitcccc.206
Posted: Thu Jun 12 23:18:17 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Jun-86 07:06:54 EDT
References: <577@scirtp.UUCP> <124@bakerst.UUCP> <583@scirtp.UUCP> <585@scirtp.UUCP>
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In article <585@scirtp.UUCP>, jimi@scirtp.UUCP (Jim Ingram) writes:
> > 
> Perhaps I was a bit harsh... but I still feel AT&T was dishonest. If a
> dishonest statement is not a lie, what is it? All the stuff about Mercedes
> attempts to shift the point, as does the comment re the "real world."
> Making a statement that someting "provides 75% of the power" for "7% of
> the cost" implies that the less powerful, less expensive item is somehow
> a reasonable replacement for the more expensive item. 
You know, a lot of this discussion revolves around the assumption
that if you want the power of a vax 11/780, one would buy a vax
11/780.  A friend of mine who works for DEC says that if you were
solely interested in raw cpu power you would not buy a 780, you
would buy the microvax II, which costs far less than the 780,
but has 90% of its power, in cpu intensive applications.  He also
mentioned a couple of other important things. First, the 780 is
an all purpose performance machine (for its day).  It was designed
to handle multitasking multiprocess environments well.  It has
a one instruction "switch task", which I believe the 68000 lacks.
The 780 has virtual memory, does the Unix PC? The benchmarks do
not test the i/o capabilities of the machine, which in a multitask
environment is often the bottleneck.  Furthermore, the Unix PC runs
Unix (obviously), where the main bottleneck of the machine is its
i/o. All in all I do feel that the ad is somewhat misleading.
But hopefully, prospective buyers will ignore the ad and get
some real facts on what the machine is capable of doing.

P.S. Does anyone know what the price ratio between the Vax 11/780
and the Microvax II is?

-- 
Kenneth Ng: uucp(unreliable) ihnp4!allegra!bellcore!njitcccc!ken
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(Yes, we are slowly moving to RCF 920, kicking and screaming)

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