Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zds-ux!gerry
From: gerry@zds-ux.UUCP (Gerry Gleason)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: IBM RISC
Message-ID: <192@zds-ux.UUCP>
Date: 21 Feb 90 17:33:31 GMT
References: <9376@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: gerry@zds-ux.UUCP (Gerry Gleason)
Organization: Zenith Data Systems
Lines: 114

In article <9376@portia.Stanford.EDU> underdog@portia.Stanford.EDU (Dwight Joe) writes:
|In article <186@zds-ux.UUCP> gerry@zds-ux.UUCP (Gerry Gleason) writes:
||(Dwight Joe) wrote:
|||Here we have SUN and MIPS, the companies that first came out with
|||good RISC machines (like Apple that first came out with a good
|||personal computer--much better than the TRS-80 8^) ).  hmmmm....

||You obviously don't know that much about the beginnings of the personal
||computer market.  Apple's first accomplishment was to be just about
||the only playing in the "hobby" computer market to survive the transition
||to personal computers (pc, not IBM pc).

|Commodore and Tandy (i.e. TRS-XX) survived.  Atari survived--barely.
|But Ohio Scientific's line of pc's died.

None of these (except maybe Ohio Scientific) were really in the "hobby"
market.  These were late commers whose machines were really game machines
until much later (Amiga, Atari 520st etc.).  There were (are?) other
companies that survived in niche markets, for example Cromemco or Altos
(maybe a bad example, but I don't know Altos' early history).  Apple is
really the only one who started more or less from scratch and survived.
Atari, Commodore and Tandy were all established companies before entering
the small computer markets.  Also, Tandy doesn't really count because they
have a large captive retail market, and they will (do?) continue to market
machines even if there products fail and they have to OEM machines (I
suppose they already do).

|I wonder about the NEXT......

||In this case, your analogy doesn't even work since, although Apple II's
||and PC clones overlap, the Apples could not handle many applications that
||the clones were spec'ed for.

|You've overlooked something.  The very first model of the 
|IBM pc with 8088 was not designed for all those specs either.  Later
|models had changes.

But the first models did have options that made them more suitable for
the office (the available 25x80 screen was important then), and quite
soon after you could put in a multi-function board with more memory, and
maybe a hard disk, and then it's just as useful as present 8088 based
clones.

|IMHO, the IBM pc was initially designed to compete against the Apple II.
|The very first model actually had a port for connecting to a 
|tape recorder so that you could operate the system WITHOUT a disk
|drive.  The very first model came with a max. of 64 kB.

I agree.

|This doesn't sound like a computer that was initially design
|for those "specs" that you were mentioning.

Actually, this fits in with what I said before.  IBM would never
have knowingly introduced a line of machines that would eventually
cut into their other lines of more expensive machines; it was a
mistake.  The early standard configurations allowed it to come to
market as a home machine, but it was they way it could be configured
as a desktop that made it take off.  I'm sure the designers and
promoters understood this, but the "big boys" at corporate HQ didn't,
and away it went.  Took them most of ten years to kill it, and then
it was too late.

||The workstation market, on the other hand,
||is a continueum in which even Sun's change from 680x0 based systems to
||SPARC doesn't really open up new applications, but only new capacities
||for speed and the size of problems.

|Actually, what's REALLY different about this new RISC workstation
|market is that no one's thought about upward compatibility with
|the next generation of RISC.  

Wrong again.  The reason UNIX (or open systems if you prefer buzz
words) is taking off now is because of its portability to new
architectures.  Just as they shifted emphasis from the 680x0
machines to SPARC, they can move to a new architecture if necessary.
When (if?) someone develops an ANDF that effectively addresses
application portability, upward compatibility becomes a non-issue.

|The RISC argument is that you find the optimum instruction set
|to mate with the technology.  Fine.  But what happens when you've
|come up with a better architecture, like the IBM's 6000?
| [ ... ]

|If the answer is "no" (we don't incorporate upward compatibility),
|then Sun LOSES.  The new Sun competitor against the IBM 6000
|won't have ANY software adantage, which would be crucial in [ ... ]

The real question for Sun (and others) is whether the architectural
features of the 6000 really are that big of a win.  This is not a
question that can be answered by comparing specific machines (say
IBM 6000 vs the fastest SPARCserver) because there are too many
variables to say whether the difference is in the processor or the
system architecture.  Probably multiple functional units operating
in parallel are a big win, if complexity doesn't kill you (HW and SW).
If true, Sun will need to develop a SPARCII and MIPS a MIPSII instruction
set, but even so the SPARC and MIPS performance envelopes will continue
to be pushed.  The 6000 isn't even good enough to compete with the ECL
RISC's presently coming to market, so these architectures still have a
lot of room.

|I still think that if the IBM 6000's specs are as good as
|they appear, then certain RISC workstation manufacturers
|will have some sleepless nights.

Maybe, but the foundations of the workstation market is open systems,
something IBM has always been hostile towards.  Many people went to
these markets to get away from the locked in proprietary solutions
sold by companies like IBM, so they don't have a very good image with
these people.  The bottom line in this market is price/performance, so
if they score well here, people will buy, the IBM label doesn't mean
that much.

Gerry Gleason