Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!peregrine!elroy!ames!ncar!tank!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!urbsdc!aglew
From: aglew@urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Architecture Wars, again; survey
Message-ID: <28200224@urbsdc>
Date: 2 Nov 88 06:29:00 GMT
References: <7316@winchester.mips.COM>
Lines: 41
Nf-ID: #R:winchester.mips.COM:7316:urbsdc:28200224:000:2170
Nf-From: urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM!aglew    Nov  2 00:29:00 1988


>Gosh, there sure seems to be a lot of Sun and SPARC bashing going on in this
>group lately!  First I read how we don't care about performance, then I read
>that Mips has gone and talked everyone out of using SPARC and that we aren't
>a serious competitor to them anymore.  Pretty soon I suppose we'll just have
>to turn off the lights and go look for other--whoa!  What's this?  A 2:1
>stock split?  Big OEM orders from Fujitsu and Seiko?  Vendors rallying around
>ATT's System V.4?  #1 in the workstation business?  #1 in RISC units shipped?
>Are we talking about the same company?  :-)
>
>			Dave Emberson (dre@sun.com)

Hey, Dave, don't get me wrong. When I made my smiley about SUN making liars
out of the folks who think that CPUs are no longer a bottleneck, I meant
it well. SUN still has the attitude that software should do whatever it
has to do to be functional, and hardware should provide the speed. That
is a characteristic of a strong, brash, young company.  Companies that trade
off software functionality for system performance are typically older,
more staid; the best "performance engineers", tuners and tweakers, come
from such companies, but the best software does not.  Are there companies
that go for high functionality software, rely on hardware for high performance,
as well as doing good software performance engineering?  I like to think
that I work for such a company, and I'm sure you like to think the same
thing of your employer, too...



Andy "Krazy" Glew. 
at: Motorola Microcomputer Division, Champaign-Urbana Development Center
    (formerly Gould CSD Urbana Software Development Center).
mail: 1101 E. University, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
email: (Gould addresses will persist for a while)
    aglew@gould.com     	    - preferred, if you have MX records
    aglew@fang.gould.com     	    - if you don't
    ...!uunet!uiucuxc!ccvaxa!aglew  - paths may still be the only way
   
My opinions are my own, and are not the opinions of my employer, or any
other organisation. I indicate my company only so that the reader may
account for any possible bias I may have towards our products.

PS. I promise to shorten this .signature soon.