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From: bzs@ENCORE.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Taking stock...
Message-ID: <8902162247.AA28231@multimax.encore.com>
Date: 16 Feb 89 22:47:08 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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Apollo is shipping a 4-processor box (DN10000) which claims around 100
MIPS performance with respectable floating point and I/O.

DEC has just announced the PMAX, a desktop machine based on the MIPS
chip which does 25,000 dhrystones (about 13MIPS) for $11,900. That's
almost twice the speed of DEC's biggest (read: $1M) VAXes.

Rumors abound of impending 40-50MIPS announcements for all the major
RISC chips. All have vendors building (typically) 4 processor deskside
configurations (ie. 150-200MIPS.) All should be available for well
under $100K in the next 12-18 months.

Meanwhile the big mainframes (multi-million dollar) are puffing along
with about 100MIPS in their biggest configurations.

What does it all mean?

Perhaps a paradigm shift? BIG no longer equals FAST and vice versa?

When you add in the fact that the big mainframes typically have
100-250 users log in the implications become breathtaking. We'll leave
the exotic machines (eg. Cray) out of this for the moment since
they're relatively rare (and the few that exist tend to be
overcommitted.)

In a way it makes sense, at this point in history what magic would the
big machine builders have that would make their CPUs fast?

Will it soon be the mark of the quaint dinosaur who looks at a desktop
workstation and says "I need a big, fast machine!" Sort of like a
person who still thinks data is only safe when it's on punchcards?
Or that real programmers use assembler?

Sure, there's still I/O. I/O speed will probably fall as a factor
which distinguishes big machines from small ones for the same
reason...*speed* comes from chips, and chips ain't big!

What won't fall so fast will be I/O size. Few people want a terabyte
spinning in their office, the sheer size of that kind of equipment
remains a limit for the foreseeable future (not that it won't happen,
but when data becomes large there's still an economy to sharing it out
of a central location, particularly when it's costed on a per-copy
basis.)

The point is obvious, organizations which have built their empires by
providing MIPS are, in most cases, doomed...

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||