napi@rangkom.MY (Mohd Hanafiah Abdullah) (04/04/91)
I have just come back from s product launch here in Malaysia, of HP's their latest workstations, the HP-Apollo Series 720, 730, and 750. I thought the architecture was superscalar but apparently not. They are wonderfully fast. I would like to know what they have done to make it so fast (76 MIPS, with 55 MHZ clock) for the 730/750 models, just by using the traditional RISC architecture. HP claims it is the highest performance RISC based workstation so far, even faster than the IBM RS6000 Power Architecture (superscalar). I tend to believe that other RISC manufacturers like SUN, and especially MIPS would be able to achieve and maybe exceed this kind of performance as well even without using superscalar architecture or ECL technology. They could increase the performance of their workstations only by improved compiler technology, increasing the clock speed and fine tuning and balancing the processor with the overall sub-systems. Please respond by email. Regards. Napi