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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The 360 was a design landmark  (360 vs vax)
Message-ID: <26444@sun.uucp>
Date: Tue, 25-Aug-87 01:30:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.26444
Posted: Tue Aug 25 01:30:37 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Aug-87 05:16:41 EDT
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> The 360 designers saw fit (or did they just guet luckie...I don't
> think so!) to design *PIPELINING-CAPABILITY* into the 360.

I dunno about that; when did the first pipelined machines come out?

> 12-bit offsets, EBCDIC, and IBM-marketing asside, THE *MAJOR*
> reason the ancint 360/370 stuff is still alive, while DEC's vaxen
> are falling by the wayside (despite DES's best efforts)

VAXes falling by the wayside?  I dunno about that, either.  DEC, VAXes, and VMS
seem to be doing quite well for themselves.

> is that 360's *CAN* be pipelined (tho not necessarily real easily) and
> VAXen can't!  

VAXes can't be pipelined?  Gee, I suspect some of the 8600's designers would be
surprised to hear that.

> Top 370 designes top out at 20 MIPS (or is it more now?)
> Top Vax design is maybe 8 MIPS.

So?  By itself, that may merely indicate that DEC hasn't pushed raw hardware
technology as hard as IBM has.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com