<> If you're doing ray tracing, get a fast PC. <> If you're timesharing dozens of people, a VAX is not a bad choice. < <I remain unconvinced(!). Then what would work better for fast ray tracing. and why does my ISP have a 24x250mhz SGI and not 24 PIII/xeons? <> It's all about "balance" and truly good designers can get good balance fo <> the task at hand without being stuck in some rut. Big time Chuck. I like the mix, I like to mix. Thinking of the 11/55 story. 1970, KA10 (PDP10) 300 users (mostly TTYs) in schools never using more than maybe 70%. Plus batch processes for version clerical tasks related to the operation of the BOCES LIRYCS timeshare system. Now That was BIG iron (12 6ft racks!). But if I took all the PCs needed to provide the same interconnected services and stacked them up they would easily outweigh the KA10 and much more power, try 300x200W that is 60KW, the Ka10 was under 10KW and like near 6KW. <> (For Mike, have you ever actually run a 486 based PC architecture machine <> with a dozen actual serial interfaces connected to terminals? It is <> instructive because the damn things saturate the ISA bus and no disk <> traffic happens at all! < <(Hi Chuck!) < <Here's my back-of-the-envelope: < <The 16-bit ISA bus on a 486dx2/66 runs at 8 MHz. The total bus throughput <for memory operations is 32 megabits/sec. (4 cycles = 500 ns, 16 bits/cycle yes, but the IO is polled or interrupt and that adds 500% overhead. <If your dozen uarts are on a memory-mapped card, and you're pumping 19.200 <b/s continuously to the dozen uarts, that's 184,320 b/s required by the <uarts. That's only about 0.6% of the available bus bandwidth (about one <uart transfer every 174 Main Memory references.) Yes, you do have to work <with such slow memory, and now we understand why cache memory was so import <even on dx2/66 motherboards. So, yeah, keeping a dozen terminals blazing <output would be "fun" with an ISA-only bus! It's not 184320, thats how many are transfered, not the process loading. The system might require that to be dispersed across 12 buffers and there are overheads associeted with that. So your understating the actual task and loading. While the ISA bus is running at its speed the cpu is basically locked to that and the memory accesses that could occur, don't. The actual performance is not impressive. FYI: vax using the same approach would really be poor too. This kind of IO was typical of PDP-11s and they did it very well. The big iron solution is hardware and non competeing busses to unload the cpu from the IO task and not burden the memory with the slow IO cycles. Therein is part of the difference. Old iron treated the cpu as a valuable resource and were designed with the idea that cpu cycles were expensive. <(Incidentally, I am -not- advocating ISA as some sort of "wunderbus"; on th Yes it's perfomance is par with mid range(ca 1977) unibus and Qbus of 10 years before. By 1981 DEC had decided that those busses were ok for their use but they needed faster buses. FYI BI bus was a 64bit bus (minimum access was a 8byte chunk) and in use about 8 years before PCI was conceived (or VESA, VL). the big iorn was always trying to feed the data rate habit and usually long before PCs. < contrary, I remain amazed that it has taken the PC industry as long as it < has to recognize the importance of I/O speed. 64-bit 66 MHz PCI and 2x AG < are steps in the right direction... Yes, the microcomputer industry seem < hellbent on re-discovering what the mainframe and mini guys knew 20 or 40 < years ago...) Yes. thats the whole point. Allison