rob@wilbur.coyote.trw.com (Robert Heiss) (03/23/91)
I wish the workstation design, marketing, and benchmarks would pay more attention to integer performance. The newest machines are impressive floating-point screamers. However, like the vast majority of workstation users, our day to day applications (software development, ECAD, document formatting) use only integer cycles. The Decstation 5000 (based on 25 MHz R3000) has the best integer performance of any moderately-priced workstation on the market now. I benchmarked our local ECAD software (logic simulation, routing, test generation) on Decstations, IBM 320, and our assortment of SPARC and 68k machines. The Decstation was fastest on each of our real-world applications. So if DEC market share is not on a favorable trend, it's not because their workstations are dogs. And if they can bring out either an R4000 or a high clock-rate R3000 desktop this year, they will probably retain the integer performance lead vs. the FP-optimized RS6000, SPARC, and PA offerings. Robert Heiss rob@wilbur.coyote.trw.com Disclaimer: personal opinion of the author