5 Oct
2007
5 Oct
'07
10:55 a.m.
Using ultra-fast ECL doesn't make much sense when
you've got nanoseconds
of delay to the backplane, to the next board, and back to the part that
needs the signal.
That depends on how tight everything is. Thermal Conduction Module, anyone?
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.
Even though the 9000s were bombs, they are one of the few VAX machines
I would chase after.
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.
--
Will