gauging interest in VAX 6000-530

On Sun, 24 Oct 1999, Allison J Parent wrote: If you look at: http://www.digital.com/timeline/1990-4.htm It states: "The VAX 6500 processor delivered approximately 13 times the power of a VAX-11/780 system, per processor." To me, that means "13 MIPS". 13 MIPS is about 2 to almost 3 times slower than a 486dx2/66. But let's take a look at some Dhrystone 2.1 numbers I found: CPU MIPS MIPS System OS CPU (MHz) V1.1 V2.1 ---------------------- ------------ ----------- ----- ------ ------ VAX 8650 4.3 BSD ----------- 18 6.3 6.2 cc -non_shared -DUNIX -O5 -ifo 80486DX2/66 Linux 2.0.0 80486DX2 66 29.3 26.9 gcc 2.7.2, gcc -DUNIX -O2 80486DX2/66 NetBSD 1.4.1 80486DX2 66 ---- 34.4 egcs -DUNIX -O2 For the Dhrystone 2.1 case, 26.9 / 6.2 = 4.33 --> dx2/66 is 4 1/3 times as fast as the 8650. (Using the slower Linux numbers, too). As a sanity check, look at http://www.digital.com/timeline/1984-3.htm For the 8600, it states: "The VAX 8600, shown here during assembly, offered up to 4.2 times the performance of the industry standard VAX-11/780... ". Therefore, the 8600 was 4.2 MIPS. I can't find Dhrystone 2.1 numbers for the 8650, but let's be generous, and assume that the 8650 was 1.5x as fast as the 8600 (because the 785 was 1.5x the 780). That puts the 8650 at 6.3 MIPS, which is in rough agreement with the other Dhrystone number, above. And, back of the envelope, the 6500 was 2x the 8650. So, if it is not a typo on http://www.digital.com/timeline/1990-4.htm then my original assertion is, indeed, correct: The 6500 is 2x to 3x slower than a dx2/66. ( And the vax 6000-530 is even slower. ) I don't know what it is about collectors that somehow confuses their memories of the past; maybe their internal core memories have suffered some bit flips? ;-) (I have some old junk, too, so I consider myself in the same camp...) Fact is, these old machines were slow, noisy, hot, power-guzzling behemouths compared with what we have today. As you know, the vax would run the X -client- which, of course, is not much of a load. And as for running 50 users, heck, at the VCF 3.0 there was a guy showing an 8080 running timesharing on a bunch of terminals! Therefore, to me, you have to measure the performance in some repeatable way. Dhrystone is not the perfect benchmark (which is close to an oxymoron anyway), but it is -a- benchmark for integer CPU performance. It's too bad that you had to run w3.11; I'm assuming you're running a real OS on the dx2/66. Now, let's talk about busses. Just how fast -was- this CI? Let's compare that with 66 MHz 64-bit PCI, which has 66e6 x 64 = 4,224,000,000 bits/sec peak throughput. What was CI's throughput? -Mike Cheponis