Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!udel!rochester!rutgers!att!ulysses!andante!alice!debra From: debra@alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: BSD for AT? Message-ID: <8791@alice.UUCP> Date: 18 Jan 89 22:54:37 GMT References: <13702@ico.ISC.COM> <1445@leah.Albany.Edu> Reply-To: debra@alice.UUCP () Organization: AT&T, Bell Labs Lines: 42 In article <1445@leah.Albany.Edu> rds95@leah.Albany.Edu (Robert Seals) writes: >The Sun 386i with SunOS 4.0 is an example of an Intel architecture >running a BSD-derived system*. Unfortunately, it's somewhat proprietary >(the call of capitalism has won you, Bill joy (;). There are certain >problems running Unix on chips <= 80286, which have been detailed elsewhere. >But now that I have this nice 20MHz 386 box on my desk, I want 4.3!!! > Sun could easily come out with SunOS 4.0 for a basic 386 box, since they did some of the development for the Sun 386i on Compacs (mostly because they didn't have the Sun 386i yet while they were writing the software). But they don't want to do that of course, because they want to sell the 386i. Now, I ran a couple of tests on a 16Mhz 6386 (not exactly a fast box one could say, no cache or anything...) with plain AT&T Unix and on the 25Mhz Sun 386i (with cache and everything). The following small table will make it very clear that although the Sun hardware is indeed about twice as fast as thhe 6386, the Unix is SLOW. test Sun 386i/250 AT&T 6386 LOW-LEVEL 250000 getpid() 16.8 32.5 2500000 func-calls 5.7 10.5 sieve 3.6 6.5 100000 sines 3.1 8.6 loop 100000000 9.9 11.2 HIGH-LEVEL pipe 5Mbytes 13.8 14.3 some shell script 2.5 2.9 8 scripts & 18.7 16.7 15 scripts & 35.4 31.3 I think I'll wait until Sun gets more out of the 386 before trying to switch. Paul. -- ------------------------------------------------------ |debra@research.att.com | uunet!research!debra | ------------------------------------------------------