summers@sybil.cs.Buffalo.EDU (Michael Summers) (05/02/90)
I would like to find out if the community thinks that RISC workstations will eventually replace the high end PC's. For example SUN's new 4/50 will start selling for about $5,000, diskless. It will probably eventually sell for about $3,500 with a modest disk. This would be a 8 meg UNIX/X machine with eithernet, mouse, 16" High Resolution Monitor, and say a 400 meg disk. Digitals MIPS based workstations are getting pretty cheap also, about $6500 for a diskless machine. IBM has just introduced the RISC System/6000 series which offers a 27.5 MIP/ 7.4 MFLOP diskless system for $12,995. (by the way what chip are they using anyway?) Given the SUN example will people be buying such machines for PC's? Is this why Ashton-Tate, and Lotus are developing SPARC products? What would the limitations be to the wide-spread acceptance of RISC machines (SUN was just an example) as PC's? Will the available SW base have to grow first? Will PC and MAC like SW have to be abundantly available? Will X applications be a big market? Does anyone have any data on the number of installed RISC workstations? Does anyone have any data on the projected number of such workstations? How many high end 386's are in use. Any references to such data? Please mail and data to: summers@cs.buffalo.edu Thanks.
don@trsvax.UUCP (05/04/90)
> What would the limitations be to the wide-spread acceptance > of RISC machines (SUN was just an example) as PC's? The main reason I would not want to develop programs on a RISC machine is because the debugging tools are limited when available. In order to debug under RISC, you need to turn off all optimization and execute the instructions one at a time. After you get it working, you can recompile with optimization and *hope* it still works. I realize I've been spoiled by MS-DOS debugging, but to develop good applications in reasonable product cycles, low-level debugging is almost a necessity. If development time must increase dramatically, no one could afford the software. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Don Subt The opinions expressed above are Tandy Corp. strictly mine, not my employer's. 817-390-2923 ...!texbell!letni!rwsys!trsvax!don