5 Oct
2007
5 Oct
'07
12:14 p.m.
Will wrote:
I wrote:
> The ECL technology used in the VAX9000 was gate arrays with roughly the
> same timing parameters as 100K ECL (0.5 to 1.0 ns propogation delays).
Yes, but I do not think that was the cutting edge
anymore. Considering
the 9000 was supposed to be the machine that finally convinces the
mainframe world to accept DEC, it may have been a poor choice. We
probably will never know. 9000 may have been as big of an
embarrassment as the KC10.
The 9000 was obsoleted by the NVAX chip before the 9000 hit the street.
"the mainframe world" acceptance of a CPU is the stupidest-ass thing
a company could ever ever want. On a.f.c there were some references
to emulating Unisys architectures on Intel hardware, and I followed the
links to the trade press rags, and the rags were filled with a bunch of
useless self-important balloon-filling about CPU technologies with no evidence
that anywhere anyone understood what the emulation layer actually
did. I came away not knowing what the emulation layer actually did either
(classic CPU-technology-on-the-mind poisoning of those who should know
better).
There are about ten thousand markets that DEC served quite well, and
it's a shame they put all that effort and money into neglecting those
markets and trying to do a mainframe.
Even though the 9000s were bombs, they are one of the
few VAX machines
I would chase after.
Stack it up with all those other CPU's without peripherals, huh? :-).
> Responsiveness of a computer system depends on a
lot more than the
> speed of the semiconductors used to build it. Plenty of modern examples
> of how to make fast silicon seem slow are coming out of Redmond I
> notice :-).
I am thinking raw horsepower - all the benchmarking
stuff. Looking at
the KL10 (or the other DEC ECL machines), it justs seems like they
should have been better number crunchers.
Mainframes are really good at some things, sometimes they are decent
number crunchers in terms of pure FLOPS but it has been three to four
decades since they delivered any punch in terms of FLOPS per dollar.
Tim.