PDP-11 = Pentium Killer?

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Wed Apr 22 18:13:01 1998

After your done laughing remember this...

At the time the VAX was new in the market the PDP-11 group took most of
their standard 11/70 peices and cooked up the 11/74 which was a 4cpu SMP
11/70 and could eat vaxen(11/780) for snacks. That was it's demise...
there were only four working 11/74s built before that was crushed.

<Hmm, refresh my memory, now what were the PDP-11 instructions to
<directly address 4GB of memory? I can't seem to recall any 32 bit
<address registers.

Look in the VAX archectecture book.

<Darn. I've really lost it...how did the virtual memory hardware work in
<a PDP-11?

Nicely (again the vax is a mostly stretched 11).

<Seriously, if you mean the sorta RISC like instruction set in the 11 is

RISC?????? PDP-11 is the most CISC machine in the 16bit realm. What
other 16bitter is a two address orthoginal machine?

<better than the x86 set, then DEC probably would have come up with
<something like that. Course, with extra silicon, they could have gone
<to 64 bits, and put more cache onboard, then clock it really fast. Then
<come up with some catchy marketing name, like Gamma, or Beta, or ....

They did called it VAX and when it came time to outvax VAX then comes
alpha.

Allison
Received on Wed Apr 22 1998 - 18:13:01 BST

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