woolstar@nntp-server.caltech.edu (John D. Woolverton) (04/19/91)
I attended an interesting session on the HP PA-RISC strategy and the HP tech conf. wednesday in Anaheim. After adjusting to the annoying neon lights and other marketing junk on stage, and tuneing out the Sun and MIPS bashing, I picked up a few interesting notes. First of all, HP has been aquiring (eating) quite a few more companies than I realized. Along with Apollo, HP has aquired the skills of quite a few software companies (like Multiflow) and has geared them to help it with compiler and software efforts. It's seems like it may be working. HP mentioned two partnerships, as wells as the hopes of what each would bring. * Samsung -- bring PA-RISC below $5,000 on the desktop probably without the TI floating point. * Hitatchi -- taking advantage of the BiCMOS process to crank clock speed even further ( > 90MHz ? ) They also presented some interesting details about some of the designs of the sub systems. Supposedly, the Memory manager (viper) has the circuitry necissary for using standard memory for Z-buffering. No mention was made of how applications could take advantage of this. Compiler advances included a tool for evaluating code on test data, to build up information about scheduling and branch prediction. No mention of what language support was available or cost. EISA support was discussed, and although it isn't on the fast bus, it looks as if it's going to be fast enough to support periferal needs for quite some time. Driver support is supposed to be coming real soon. I give HP top marks as well for taking the time and effort to explain benchmarks (noticable SPEC), and stressing that the best aproach is for the customer to benchmark his own application. Of course, with their current performance, they can afford to be generous. What I didn't like was all the double takes, technical and marketing wise. After going on about how great the Z-buffering support was, the graphics line doesn't even use it. After going on about how important it was to have complete inhouse fabbing for privacy, experience and control, they mentioned that TI fabbed the FPU and the partnership with Hitachi for it's BiCMOS. And of course the $7,000 for two additional DACs, to get color. (I realize that the color option is more than this, but the price is not realistic.) What I'm wondering is, with the EISA bus on this machine, if someone might take the trouble to get a SVGA card working, or better yet the $5,000 full color 3D visualization card from SGI. $12,000 + $5,000 plus some minor stuff, to get a system that is better all around than my 4d35G sounds like a great deal. woolstar@cobalt.caltech.edu Video Bits