Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Next computer (Re: CISC Silent Spring)
Message-ID: <2113@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 9 Feb 90 18:20:06 GMT
References: <8905@portia.Stanford.EDU> <160@zds-ux.UUCP> <2100@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <7356@pdn.paradyne.com>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 20

In article <7356@pdn.paradyne.com> alan@oz.paradyne.com (Alan Lovejoy) writes:

| But that was a strange question to ask.  The natural question would seem
| to be "What has SPARC got that the 88k, and the Rx000, don't?"

  You may like Sun, or hate them, but it seems unwise to ignore them.
By going SPARC a vendor gains access to a very large number of
applications already ported to run on the CPU. SPARC has software, and
(as MS-DOS proves) a CPU and o/s will be popular is there's enough good
software for it, even if the o/s and CPU are at least a decade behind
state of the art. 

  The fastest production versions of SPARC seem to beat the fastest
production versions of CISC, and SunOS is reasonably up to date as a
unix version, so there are obvious benefits from SPARC which the 88k
didn't offer when it was selected. Oh, and SPARC is multi-source, too.

-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
            "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me