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From: gengenba@unipas.fmi.uni-passau.de (Michael Gengenbach)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.dec
Subject: DECStation vs. SPARCstation, need help!
Message-ID: <486@unipas.fmi.uni-passau.de>
Date: 9 Jun 89 11:14:01 GMT
Reply-To: gengenba@unipas.fmi.uni-passau.de (Michael Gengenbach)
Followup-To: comp.arch
Organization: University of Passau, W-Germany
Lines: 36

Hi folks,

I know, that this question could mean war, but we really need some
decision support. We are the Bavarian AI Research Center (FORWIS)
and we have to buy our first computer equipment, which is not an
easy job :-).

We will buy some 40 UNIX-Workstations und about 3 large fileservers.
Now there are two favorized Workstations:

    - DECStation 3100
    - SPARCstation 1 or SPARCstation 330

As we do not have much knowledge in RISC-technology, we have a couple
of questions:

   - which RISC-architecture (MIPS, SPARC) is more common in the U.S.?

   - what do you think about RISC vs. CISC in performance of
     AI-applications (Lisp, Prolog, Databases, image-processing),
     i.e. symbolic computation?

   - can one trust in MIPS-ratings (14 for DECStation, 12.5 SPARCstation 1)?

   - how about the software availability, especially AI software?

If you're going to answer, please do not flame! Keep technical!

Thank you in advance

   Michael
-- 
Michael Gengenbach   \/\/\/\/\/ gengenbach@unipas.fmi.uni-passau.de
AI Research Center    \/\/\/\/  gengenbach%unipas.fmi.uni-passau.de@unido.BITNET
University of Passau  /\/\/\/\  gengenbach%unipas.fmi.uni-passau.de@relay.CS.NET
West Germany         /\/\/\/\/\ Phone: +49 851/509-533