mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) (05/04/88)
[Followups directed to comp.sys.misc, since this has nothing to do with Unix, and comp.sys.sun isn't a good forum for newsgroup-style interactions.] In comp.unix.questions (<148@gsg.UUCP>), lew@gsg.UUCP (Paul Lew) writes: >I would like to find out more information about Road Runner from its user. >Is it a stable machine to buy? How about performance compare to other >product? Do the 16-bits bus slow it down at all? Ah, it's only just occurred to me what that question about the bus meant. On the Sun 386i, the processor and main memory are NOT connected via the silly 16-bit AT bus. Instead, they use a proprietary 32-bit interconnect scheme (it's not really a bus), allowing things to run as fast as possible. There wouldn't be much point building a 32-bit Unix machine around a 25 MHz 80386, then sticking the memory on a slow 16-bit bus, now would there :-) Interesting observation: I think Sun is the only company in the workstation market that's delivering product lines based on 3 radically different CPU architectures (M68K, I80386, SPARC) running the same OS and being pretty much completely compatible at both the source code and user levels. (I.e., you can sit at a Sun3, Sun4, or 386i and they all look the same -- in fact, if someone hid the box and just gave you the mouse, keyboard and screen you might not be able to tell which one you were using without hunting around the filesystem). Are there any counter-examples I'm missing? Also, as Guy Harris and others have pointed out, the new filesystem layout is supposedly based on a scheme worked out jointly by Sun, DEC, and UCB. I guess I just haven't seen anything written on the latest thinking at the latter two. -- Matt Landau Takes more than combat gear to make a man, mlandau@bbn.com Takes more than a license for a gun. Confront your enemies - avoid them when you can. A gentleman will walk but never run.