Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!gwu
From: gwu@clyde.ATT.COM (George Wu)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Architectural analysis of RPM-40 for general usage
Summary: No, I think Henry's right. Maybe you misread him?
Keywords: average program size, workstation usage
Message-ID: <23698@clyde.ATT.COM>
Date: 22 Mar 88 16:25:46 GMT
References: <1840@winchester.mips.COM> <514@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> <1988Mar18.174031.653@utzoo.uucp> <10018@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwu@clyde.UUCP (George Wu)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Whippany NJ
Lines: 41

In article <10018@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> davidsen@kbsvax.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr) writes:
>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.

> . . . 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 doubt that it's common to run really large stuff on a workstation.


     I agree with Henry. But oddly, I mostly agree with Bill, too. Here's
my argument/example. Most of my workstation experience has been for using
Magic, U. C. Berkeley's VLSI layout system. Jobs tend to be long running
editing sessions, ie. interactive. And we (students, this was back when I
was working on my BS) used workstations. One slight contradiction here is
that Magic was a pretty large program. But for a big high resolution station,
we tended to have several megabytes of memory on board anyways. And a few pages
usually didn't matter, since they were pretty fast compared to interactive
use. I think the key word Henry used was "interactive."

     When we needed to do really CPU intensive stuff, ie. simulate the
circuit, then we'd move it over to something bigger. But most of the stuff
was done on a workstation.

     Overall, both of you seem to be correct.

-- 
					George J Wu

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