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From: ab3@pucc-h (Darth Wombat)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: IBM vs VAX/unix
Message-ID: <571@pucc-h>
Date: Fri, 2-Mar-84 01:05:59 EST
Article-I.D.: pucc-h.571
Posted: Fri Mar  2 01:05:59 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Mar-84 09:47:52 EST
Organization: Purdue University Computing Center
Lines: 42


	William Pearson  has compared the performance
of an IBM-PC with a Vax running unix for an application that (as far as I can
tell) involves large amounts of string pattern matching and correlation...
and says:

	"I am now tempted to think of "1/2 of a VAX" as simply 3 IBM-PC's."

	For your task, it certainly looks like the IBM-PC is a cost-effective
way to do your computing...and we could go round and round arguing about 
relative compiler efficiencies and use of native instruction sets and so on,
but consider the point given.

	The problem that this has touched in my mind is that your experience
is the sort of thing that lots of university computer honchos get stuck on
about the time that get Mac-attacked or PC-ized or whatever...and the
 is not comparable to a Vax running Unix for
a very large class of tasks commonly done around places like this; for example,
I (and about 40 other people in a graduate class) are doing massive amounts
of image processing/analysis in Lisp -- and I just can't see this stuff running
on a personal computer.   Not to mention one colleague working on simulating
Lisp running on a parallel machine, or another doing diffraction tomography
computations -- or the hordes of undergraduates burning up the floating point
units running Spice (a circuit simulator/modeler).

	Why the near-flame?  I (often) question the wisdom of those who are
so enthralled with these cute little micros which are fine for teaching Pascal,
or acclimatizing people to computers, or even running smaller applications,
that they forget that a large number of us *need* megaflops...

	We have something like 2 dozen vaxes at Purdue, 3 CDC 6000-series
mainframes, a Cyber 205 supercomputer, and numerous other species of machines
ranging from 11/23's to 11/750's, and nearly all of them run flat out from
8 a.m. to well past midnight six days a week, and (later in the semesters)
sometimes more than that.  What are we going to do with a dozen IBM-PC's
or twenty Mac's that will *really* help this situation?

-- 

"Oh dear...I believe you'll find that reality is on the blink again."
Darth Wombat
UUCP: { allegra, decvax, ihnp4, harpo, seismo, teklabs, ucbvax } !pur-ee!rsk