pritch@osu-eddie.UUCP (Norman Pritchett) (12/04/84)
Can anyone out there confirm or deny runors that DEC is working on a RISC machine? This question was just asked at a Digital presentation here on the Vax 8600 but the representatives on hand had no idea. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Norm Pritchett - The Generic Hacker "Let's give it to normie, he'll hack anything" osu-eddie!pritch
smh@mit-eddie.UUCP (Steven M. Haflich) (12/07/84)
Indeed, a friend working on the West Coast had a job interview with a DEC group developing a RISC machine. I have no further details. It can't be all that much of a secret if DEC tells randoms what they are doing during job interviews, but the project certainly does seem to have a low profile. I would guess that the effort is a research project and probably is not immediately targeted as a product. This raises interesting questions about DEC's product line of `real' machines -- that is, ignoring the various PCs and the aging smallness of the PDP11. DEC's recent product strategy is to market any size, shape, color, style, and price of computer that the customer might want, just so long as it's object-compatible with a VAX and will run VMS. But what happens if after a few more years it becomes apparent that the `right' way to achieve superior peformance/price ratios executing high-level languages is RISC rather than VAX-style CISC? Then DEC will have to do some fast and furious back pedalling, in software as well as hardware. Of course, IBM has been successfully managing to preserve some measure of up, down, and sideways compatibility with the original 360 instruction set for almost twenty years now, and that instruction set is hardly a model of how to do things in the '80s.