Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!lll-tis!ames!hao!boulder!fesk!hoover!mike
From: mike@hoover.UUCP (mike gehl)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.nsc.32k
Subject: Re: kit wishlist and software
Message-ID: <134@hoover.UUCP>
Date: 24 Feb 88 20:57:33 GMT
References: <23506@hi.unm.edu>
Organization: National Semiconductor, Denver, CO
Lines: 40

in article <23506@hi.unm.edu>, cyrus@hi.unm.edu (Tait Cyrus) says:
> 
> 
> We are currently porting GENIX to our hardware.
> To those of you who have suggested using GENIX, I would say DO NOT
> USE IT.  Namely, the GENIX C compiler, along with GENIX itself,
> We would like to go to the 32532 in our next iteration of our design
> for both our I/O and compute engines so I would be interested in
> in any 32532 designs.
> 
Tait, a couple of points:

1) You seem to have a rather interesting project on your hands; by "porting
GENIX" to your hypercube implementation, do you mean Unix? (4.1,4.2,5.2,5.3)
If so, this has staggering implications as far as the kernel is concerned.
If I assume you mean the GNX language tools, you will find that at current(GNXR2
externals are not supported, and the optimizer is what we consider to be 
"state of the art"..i.e. somewhat more sophisticated than the Greenhills 
"garden variety" supercompilers that Mot and Intel tout. I've seen typically
a 25-40% improvement in performance over what i suspect you've got.

2) there are now, I believe, 3 532 implementations on the market:
	a) the vme532 from NSC
	b) a 532 VME board from Heurikon, announced this week,
	and c) a 532 AT coprocessor from Aeon Technologies, of Denver, CO.

They all, to the best of my knowledge, feature at least the 532, 381 FPU,
and 4MB of RAM. Other features differ, of course. The NSC and Aeon have 5.3,
the Heurikon I'm not sure (a Real-timer at least). And they all basically
blow away any 68k, 80x86, or Clipper units in terms of performance (this IS
posted to the 32k group, isn't it?), and I haven't seen anything close to 
advertised performance for the SPARC (remember the Clipper's 33 Million NOP's
per second? A register add and a store aren't two whole instructions in my
book!). Basically, these boards constitute  the most poop for the buck at
this time.

Good Luck,
Mike Gehl, National Semiconductor denver.

* i THINK that the preceding message is the opinion of my company. If it isn't,
we're in deep .........