Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!sri-unix!garth!fenwick
From: fenwick@garth.UUCP (Stephen Fenwick)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Architectural analysis of RPM-40 for general usage
Message-ID: <576@garth.UUCP>
Date: 24 Mar 88 22:13:42 GMT
References: <1840@winchester.mips.COM> <514@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> <1988Mar18.174031.653@utzoo.uucp> <10018@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> <23698@clyde.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: fenwick@garth.UUCP (Stephen Fenwick)
Distribution: na
Organization: INTERGRAPH (APD) -- Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 47

In article <23698@clyde.ATT.COM> gwu@clyde.UUCP (George Wu) writes:
>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. [...]

   Let me add that I agree with George.  Where he and I did our BS work,
we used Sun 2's & RT's to run Magic, then 11/780's and Sun 4's to run Spice.
So even here, there was the migration of what were traditional jobs for
minis moving to workstations.
   I have also seen an 8600 used to directly drive Tek terminals for
chip routing, which is a traditional workstation job.
   We (Intergraph APD) use Clipper-based boards in AT's to do large simulation
jobs (e.g., gate-level simulation of the entire CPU/FPU chip, for >400k 
simulated clock cycles, or about 1 *week* of cpu time). We used to use an 8600
for this, but: a) we couldn't fit the whole simulation onto the machine without
thrashing it;  b) the 8600 was much slower even for a smaller model.
We have gotten an order of magnitude performance gain by going from a large, 
mega-buck, multi-user mainframe to a small, cheap (>$15k) Unix-based 
workstations.
   So the point is, given the cpu-power now available in a small box
for a low price, thinking in terms of workstations only acting as very
smart terminals is a bit old-fashioned.  However, mainframes can be
effectively used where very large amounts of data must be shared in
a real-time interactive fashion by multiple users.

Steve Fenwick
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