Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site ucbvax.ARPA
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!cbosgd!ucbvax!info-vax
From: info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA
Newsgroups: fa.info-vax
Subject: MicroVax
Message-ID: <4109@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 10-Jan-85 00:38:06 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.4109
Posted: Thu Jan 10 00:38:06 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Jan-85 23:23:26 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.ARPA
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 19

From: stew%lhasa.UUCP@harvard.ARPA

From a recent article in Computer Technology Review by three senior
engineers from DEC:

"At the CPU board level, the performance of the MicroVAX I is superior to
the VAX-11/730 at about half its power consumption and printed circuit
board space.  Depending on the application, the performcance of the
MicroVAX I is about 60% of the VAX-11/750 at about 20% of its cost.
   An original design constraint that influenced that influenced a number
of decisions in the design process was a short time-to-market.  The main
results were the selection of an existing systems package and extremely
tight limits on the design of the CPU."

The article continues with quite a long, technical discussion of the
implementation.  It claims a 70% cache hit rate, further improved by
block-mode transfers and an instruction prefetch queue.

Stew