gauging interest in VAX 6000-530

From: Mark Green <mark_at_cs.ualberta.ca>
Date: Mon Oct 25 11:37:18 1999

> Mark Green <mark_at_cs.ualberta.ca> wrote:
> > The problems is equivalent hardware. You can't configure a PC
> > like a VAX, they are two different types of machines. A PC
> > is tuned for a single user, while a VAX is tuned for many users.
> > These are very different machine configurations, and even the latest
> > PC would have no hope of keeping up to a decade old VAX running
> > a large multiuser application.
>
> False. I have personal experience with PCs serving the same kind
> of workload you describe of VAXen, and they work fine.
>
> > Many of the PC manufacturers
> > have tried to scale PCs to this level and they have all failed.
>
> Compaq's high-end x86 based servers don't seem to have failed.

Note that in the above comments I said PC, I did not say
server. I'm talking about a PC architecture and not the
particular chip, such as an Intel chip. I have yet to see
a PC (as in workstation) have more than 2 CPUs. I can
get 2 CPU systems from the likes of HP, DELL, whoever gets
SGIs NT line, etc. But thats where it ends. On a workstation,
such as SUN, SGI, HP and probably others I can scale above
2 CPUs.

The PC architecture was designed to be low cost. It works
very well that way, but you can't say its the best architecture
for everything (which is the point being discussed). At some
point you need to go to multiple busses, multiple processors,
interleaved memory architectures, etc.

>
> > single bus systems like the PC can't scale to the performance required.
>
> The bus in a modern PC isn't the issue. It's comparable to what's
> in most workstations.
>
> The problem is the software architecture. Despite all of the ballyhoo
> surrounding MS Windows NT, the reality is that it is too bloated and
> inefficient to support enterprise applications.

I can run the same software on a PC and a workstation. I
don't need to run MS software on a PC, there are several
variants of unix that run on both workstations and PCs.

In addition there are some aspects of NT that are quite
nice (but I'll get flamed on this news group for saying
that). You need to get down to the kernel level to
appreciate it, but we throw away most of the MS stuff that
comes with our NT machines anyways.
>
>
> I'll agree with you that high-end server class machines today
> are more powerful, have higher bandwidth busses, and more busses,
> than most PCs. But how could it be otherwise? Anyhow, that's not what
> this discussion was about.
>
> The claim was that a 486DX2/66 PC could outperform a VAX 8650. And so
> far, no one has refuted that claim, though many people seem to have
> decided that it must be false, and given specious arguments as supposed
> proof. Apparently there is some sort of near-religious belief that a
> minicomputer (regardless of how old it is) MUST have better performance
> than a PC.
>

You may be arguing that, and I agree with your point. Its just
comments like the PC architecture can outrun anything that I
find hard to take. Some of these statements may have come out
in the heat of the arguments.


-- 
Dr. Mark Green                                 mark_at_cs.ualberta.ca
Professor                                      (780) 492-4584
Director, Research Institute for Multimedia Systems (RIMS)
Department of Computing Science                (780) 492-1071 (FAX)
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada
Received on Mon Oct 25 1999 - 11:37:18 BST

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