bcase@uiucdcs.UUCP (11/02/84)
[] Have just been to the formal announcement of the VAX 8600 (the venus, VAX-11/790, whatever you want). Seems like they have a pretty good machine here, although the price may be a bit more than for other systems with competetive performance. They have a pretty nice setup for diagnostics and handling machine failures: the conosle runs RT-11 from an RL02 and has all the diags on site. Plus, the system includes a 1200 baud modem for remote peeking. There are several graceful failure modes, most of which can be handled by the console (a T-11): the FPA can go up and down transparently (except for the noticeable speed difference), random errors in control store parity get fixed by the console on the fly, so that the system may hiccup for a few milliseconds, but it will not go down, etc... There are 4800 bits in the serial-scan diagnostic path, i.e., alot of the state of the machine. There are 5 copies of the general registers, so that an intermittent error in one can be fixed by having the console look of the true value in one of the other sets. etc.... The machine has an 80 ns cycle time. The 16 Kbyte cache is write-back. They claim 4.2 times the performance of a 780. They say a 512 terminal system has been tried and will be supported (!). The memory bus is 128 bits wide and cycles in 560 ns. The machine can hold 32 MBytes of main memory, comes with 12 MBytes standard. $500K for the basic model....