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From: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Newsgroups: net.micro.16k
Subject: Re: Corrigenda (VAX 780 vs mere micros)
Message-ID: <353@oakhill.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-Mar-85 10:30:41 EST
Article-I.D.: oakhill.353
Posted: Thu Mar  7 10:30:41 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 11-Mar-85 11:14:50 EST
References: <794@sjuvax.UUCP> <5025@utzoo.UUCP> <2342@nsc.UUCP>
Reply-To: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Organization: Motorola Inc. Austin, Tx
Lines: 25
Summary: 

>  This sounds great.  However, consider the fact that it takes five to twenty
>hours to generate each picture of this resoloution on a VAX 11/780 that has
>no other processes running.  Now, who is going to be dumb enough to use a
>32032 to do something like this?  If it's the occasional frame once a month,
>I can see it.  But nobody's going to do a large number of frames like this on
>a regualar basis.  Keep in mind that the 32032 is a MICROprocesser.  It's not
>made for huge jobs.  ...
>	Curt Sampson		ihnp4!alberta!jeff

Hmmm.  I detect some minicomputer elitism here.

Just for arguments sake lets say the NS32032 is only one-fourth the power of
a 780 VAX.  (In reality I'm sure its greater than that for non-floating-point
tasks.)  Now, if you had a room with four NS32032 systems processing video
frames how much would these systems cost versus a room with one 780 VAX?
I think its obvious that the micros would win here.

[And since I happen to work at Motorola ;-) ] It appears that the MC68020
in a "realistic" system (i.e. memory management and cache) runs at 780 speeds
or better for non-floating-point problems such as this one.  Now I am not
going to project what the costs of '020 systems will be but you can bet your
bottom dollar they will not come anywhere near the cost of a VAX 780.

Motorola Semiconductor Inc.             Dave Trissel
Austin, Texas            {ihnp4,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!oakhill!davet