Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Architectural analysis of RPM-40 for general usage
Message-ID: <10018@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: 21 Mar 88 14:20:52 GMT
References: <1840@winchester.mips.COM> <514@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> <1988Mar18.174031.653@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: davidsen@kbsvax.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 25
Keywords: average program size

In article <1988Mar18.174031.653@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>                                         [...] Some, perhaps most, of the
>workstation customers care mostly about how well their big, long-running,
>interactive applications perform, and don't care about averages that aren't
>weighted to reflect that.  All too often the important case is the worst
>case, not the average one.

  While I have no idea how any one site may use their workstations, in
looking at the industrial and academic use with which I'm familiar, it
sounds as though you are implying that worksataions would be used to do
mainframe computing.

  As nearly as I can determine, workstations are used for graphics,
software development, word processing, reading news, and reading mail.
They are used to provide a windowing platform with NFS, and generally
the programs run are less than 1 min cpu, less than 2MB memory
(exculding the graphics display).

  I realize that some places may not offer mainframe power for large
problems, but I doubt that it's common to run really large stuff on a
workstation. I'm sure that if others disagree I'll see it here.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me