RAY@SRI-KL.ARPA (02/12/86)
The following is few of the notes I jotted down while at a presentation on the 8200, 8300, 8800 and the BI bus. 8200,8300: The 8200 and 8300 are NOT the new microvax. The cpu is an eight chip vlsi processor (microvax is a single IC) on a single board. The 8300 has 2 8200 cpu's, VMS currently supports this using the 782 style master slave configuration (expect 4th quarter to have the fully symetric VMS v4.4 or v4.5) The compatiblity mode is not supported in hardware. They both use the new BI bus to support memory and I/O. The come with a single Unibus and Unibus adaptor. The RA series disks use a direct BI connection. There is also a CI to talk to the HSC. Uses 2 mb memory boards with up to 16 mb memory on the 8200 and 14 mb on the 8300 (will double when the come out with 4 mb boards). The 8200 is rated slightly better then a 780. The 8300 is rated better then a 782. 8800: The Top of the Line vax is billed as a scientific /engineering computer (not general use, don't know why...). Uses same technolgy as the 86x0 machines (ecl) and contains 2 cpu's with the clocks at 45ns (8600 80ns, 8650 55ns). Has the MI, Memory interconnect, a 60mb bus to interface 32 mb memory and upto 4 BI adaptors (actually only 2 bi adaptors, but each supports 2 BI's). No compatibility mode support in hardware. The console subsystem is basically a pro380, which is used for startup and shutdown, diagnostics, and configuring (can be configured to run with only a single cpu). All the BI hardware intefaces to this machine also. The 8800 is rated at slightly over 12 780's. BI Bus: 20 mb/S bus with theoretical limit, counting overhead, of 13.3 mb/s. Acual throuput is somewhere around 8 mb/s. DEC's new general purpose bus is meant as replacement for the Unibus. Uses synchronus communication with 32 bit data paths, 30 bit addresses and parity on bus. (Sounds very similar to the SBI if you ask me...). Up to 32 cards, but only 16 nodes, on the bus. The had a display model and it is very compact. Dec is selling liscenses for a one time fee of $2000 ( but only to companies with products that don't compete with DEC products). Current devices interfacing to the BI bus are: TU80 MMK11 DEUNA DH/DZ/DMF RUC25 DR11-W Near Future devices (not sure what the time frames are): NI TK50 5.25 DISK ADAPTOR (3 Winis, 1 RX50) 2 Module CI adaptor. This is just a highlight. I have some 5 pages of notes which are sketchy and I may have some information wrong, but this should be close to the truth... Ray -------
sasaki@HARVARD.HARVARD.EDU (Marty Sasaki) (02/12/86)
With the lack of compatibility mode, does this mean that TECO will finally die on VMS? Or does this mean that the long rumored native mode TECO will finally be released? Does anyone have a recent copy of TECO that they would be willing to let me have so that I could convert it to native mode? We could even use the SMG routines to implement the :w commands. The last version that I had source for was version 29. Marty Sasaki