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From: johnw@astroatc.UUCP (John F. Wardale)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: What is with these Vectors anyways?
Message-ID: <373@astroatc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 28-Jul-87 16:50:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: astroatc.373
Posted: Tue Jul 28 16:50:49 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 30-Jul-87 02:24:14 EDT
References: <218@astra.necisa.oz> <142700010@tiger.UUCP> <363@astroatc.UUCP> <8344@utzoo.UUCP> <3636@well.UUCP> <10956@amdahl.amdahl.com>
Reply-To: johnw@astroatc.UUCP (John F. Wardale)
Organization: Astronautics Technology Cntr, Madison, WI
Lines: 42
Summary: mainfrains vs super-computers

Someone asked about "mainframe" vs "super-computer"

In my mind, "super-computers" are good floating point, and are
likely to be strange (specialized) beasts.
A mainframe is a big, fast, reliable, machine.  (Great at running
drystones, and/or zillions of users) 
(Yes, a brand X computer could be a mainframe for one site, and a
"super-computer" for another, but generally isn't)

In article <10956@amdahl.amdahl.com> littauer@amdahl.UUCP (Tom Littauer) writes:
>If the Dhrystone benchmarks are to be believed, ...
>The May '87 ... Cray X-MP at 18,530, and the IBM 3090-200 at 31,250. 
and Cray-2=7480 and Amdal-5860=28,846
The Cray-2 SHOULD be close to the X-MP.  

A numericly intensive benchmark, LINPAK at n=300 has the following
results:  (All im Mega-FLOPS)
Cray XMP-1 = 106;    Cray-2 = 93;   IBM 3090-200 = 18;
(for comparison: DEC Vax11/780 = .11)

This is why the "Crays" ar "supers" and the "IBMs" are "mainframes."

Anyone have wetstone and/or other numbers for the above machines?

> If you could get it, you'd want a machine fast enough to do EVERYTHING
> quickly, not just a subset of things.

Yes, but all these machine have engineering tradeoffs to "tune"
them for the market nitch they were designed for.  (This tuning
starts in the Architacture, and continued thru the gate-level design.)


			John W

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