Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!necntc!linus!alliant!lackey
From: lackey@Alliant.COM (Stan Lackey)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The VAX Always Uses Fewer Instructions
Keywords: VAX MIPS
Message-ID: <2080@alliant.Alliant.COM>
Date: 1 Jul 88 14:24:01 GMT
References: <6921@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <28200161@urbsdc> <10595@sol.ARPA> <914@entropy.ms.washington.edu> <12179@mimsy.UUCP> <2476@winchester.mips.COM>
Reply-To: lackey@alliant.UUCP (Stan Lackey)
Organization: Alliant Computer Systems, Littleton, MA
Lines: 24

>In article <12179@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
>...
>>Who cares about the arguments?  The fact is that if you have somewhere
>>between $10,000 and $1,000,000, and want to buy the fastest machine you
>>can get for that, right now that machine is probably `RISC-based'.
>>
>>You can argue all you like as to why the Vax instruction set is better,
>>or why the 88000 instruction set is better, but the fastest Vax CPU from
>>DEC is slower than the fastest 88000 CPU from Motorola.

This isn't much of an argument.  The Alliant single CPU (released in 1985)
also beats the VAX 8700 on whets, livermore loops, linpack, etc., and
is anything but a RISC - 68020 instruction set, and floating point,
vector, and concurrency instruction sets.

Not to say that RISC is "bad" - I would rather have implemented a RISC than
the 68020, and performance could very well have been better, design time 
would probably have been less, cost would have been less, etc.  But then
again we wouldn't have been able to offer pascal, ada, or c in the
timeframe.  

There are much more than the classic RISC arguments to consider when making
a business decision.
-Stan