gauging interest in VAX 6000-530

In the real world there are to many conditions on things to make general assumtions that always work. For simplicity and cost as a generalization one fast bus will meet those needs and give good performance. Now a counter to that. For error/fault tolerence, and if the fastest bus is not fast enough then two (or more) will always win but will not be cheaper. I don't need number to prove that, the logic is deeper. To tie that to the "old" machines they ran their generations PCI and then some. I'll bet in a year or two you make the exact same arguement about the obsolete PCI bus. To make a machine I'd consider to be in the same class as the 6000 was when new right now I'd expect to see all of the fastest busses in use and multiples of them for parallelism. Current generation PCs most of us have access to are not this case and do perform well below the processor chips capabilities despite AGI, PCI, SCSI++ (LVUW), copper giga and fibre. Because even the simplest process like routing a packet requires the cpu to look at the address and see if it belongs to the port A or port B list and all the DMA in the world doenst get around that. A good example is the DEC ugly(by some) RQDX MSCP disk controller. While Qbus is maxed out around 4m words a second this controller can do one thing to keep the lowly vax off it. It can DO DMA from LINKED lists so that the controller is doing queued IOs. Now thats low end 1987 MicrovaxII technology but if we scaled that and put it on the PC it could be keeping the cache filled and other tasks while all the cpu has to do is set up task lists for it. Another is this RAID thing, a good idea if you have SCSI. The VAX was doing it over 14 years ago as part of the OS (disk shadowing). OK so your 486 can do interger math faster, few said it was false. It's just not enough of a measure. Less so to those guy where processing is putting the right data (or part) in the correct bin and charging off 10,223.245 (yes three digits!) each for them. It may be meaningless to the weather service that runs models that have data matricies that can fill gigabytes of ram (which has to be filled first!) from their terabyte disk farms. All those MIPS, MFLOP and Dhrystones are wasted if the system structure is hung up waiting for the floppy. If your are preaching newer is faster, the choir is over there, they know the words. If your saying PCs are better, well, put some bounds around that as I really feel it's one of those ALWAYS/NEVER generalizations that often bite. Allison