cdshaw@watrose.UUCP (Chris Shaw) (02/16/86)
....brazenly stolen and edited from Electronics magazine, February 3, 1986 "NEWEST VAX OUTRACES THE 11/780 BY A FACTOR OF 12 A tightly coupled dual processor, 27 new custom chips, and 186 ECL gate arrays give DEC's new VAX 8800 supermini 12 times the throughput of a 780. The $650,000 machine has 64K bytes of cache... has a 60 Mbyte/sec main memory bus and up to four new VaxBI buses for I/O at up to 30 Mbyte/sec. DEC also introduced the $127,000 Vax 8200.. a 780 at half the cost. A dual-processor version, the $160,000 Vax 8300, has nearly twice the performance of the 8200. " We have an 8600 at Waterloo, which runs about 3.6 times 780 speed. Actually, this machine's performance is impressive. Being an undergrad assignment machine, watdragon (the 8600) gets very spiky use, most recently demonstrated when the AI and Intro OpSys assignments were due the same day. There were 53 users on at one point, with a load profile that would have given a 780 an average of about 40-60. The load was between 3 and 7 the whole time, and frankly, I didn't notice. I certainly wasn't complaining. Chris Shaw watmath!watrose!cdshaw or cdshaw@watmath University of Waterloo In doubt? Eat hot high-speed death -- the experts' choice in gastric vileness !
mp@allegra.UUCP (Mark Plotnick) (02/16/86)
Are the processors in this 12-MIPS 8800 just 2 8650's? I presume that 8650's are 6 MIPS, since they're said to be 1.44 times the speed of 4-MIPS 8600's (yes, the number in the brochure really is "1.44" -- I guess DEC has just gotten their "hypersquare" technology perfected).