cs132074@cs.brown.edu (Wildebeest) (04/06/90)
In article <19267@boulder.Colorado.EDU> wallwey@boulder.Colorado.EDU (WALLWEY DEAN WILLIAM) writes: >Thanks for the info about prices. UNIX for the PC, depending on quality, >can cost from about $400 to $1500. I think SCO's UNIX cost about $750 You can get (smaller) UNIXes for the PC for c. $200. >means give you DS2100 performance. A 386 pc will give you horrible >performance for running X [at least that is what I heard from people >limited to 4MB and not using a graphics co-proc board]. This is in part >due to X11 being kludgy and very poor on performance! It requires a Yup - but they rewrote R4, and it's twice as fast. >OS/2's Presentation Manager is much faster! OS/2 is a dog. On a 286, ancient history, processor, it's slow enough. On a 386, it curls up and dies. Tests I've seen show Xenix running 2 to 5 times as fast on a 386. We have yet to see the fabled OS/3 - three years behind schedule, and reputed to be buggy as hell. >(By the way Motif's look was derived from PM). Actually, PM's look was derived from Motif, and is gradually moving toward it. >As far as floating point, the PC will really suffer, unless you put in a >387, or closer to workstation standards a Weitek 3187(sp? - num?) fp >co-proc. Yup. >Likewise if you bring the price of a workstation down to the price of a >PC, it will have the quality and performance of a PC or less. The $5900 DS2100 >is already giving up a lot for the price--monochrome, and diskless. >By the time you get the just the box to about $3500, >it won't be much of a stand-alone workstaion anymore--closer to an >X-terminal! Also PCs have the advantage of being a pure commodity. Prices on workstations are falling like a rock. A year ago you couldn't have gotten the system mentioned above for <$10,000. Nobody's saying they're there yet, but they will be soon. >Finally there are some other advantages to getting the PC. You have >access to all the MS-DOS (the most popular operating system in the world Doesn't exactly make it the best, just the first. >I have been told!)programs, you can run OS/2 (witch I think is >better than UNIX for the average user--even the engineer in the future when >more programs are written for it--subjective I know). And of course you can >run UNIX programs (albeit (sp?) a little slower) if you must. One thing >you have to realize is that the PC world is centered around the idea >-personal, not shared, and cheap! The UNIX workstation world, although its >goal is the same, its origins are not-- Well, you're entitled to your opinions, but OS/2 stinks. It's a proprietary operating system, not compatible with anything else, slow, running only on an archaic processor, and you have to pay extra $$$$ for IBM's crappy development tools. >As for the engineer, more and more software is showing up on the PC. >Here at CU, we use PSPICE and MATLAB in horrible DOS quite easily from >personal example. ( By the way I'm an Ungrad-Elec Eng. with quite a bit of >workstation experience -DS3100 to be exact!) Granted there are much better >versions of these and other programs for workstations, Damn straight. >but just wait till the OS/2 versions come out! They'll cost a BUNDLE; OS/2 is a low-volume OS and people will have to charge a lot to recoup their design investment. Besides, we've already been waiting two years, and there aren't >40 programs for OS/2. >student versions) tend to be much cheaper! Most of the good UNIX ones are free. >DOS!!! With OS/2, the environment power for programs parallels that of UNIX, >with design tools for C that make their UNIX equivalents of Vi, CC, LINT and >DBX, look like they are from the dark ages! What the hell are you talking about? IBM's proprietary tools cost huge $$, and are mostly mediocre. Independent ones are better, but still cost you through the nose, and are incompatible with each other. > >Another $.02 worth (I think?) > Dean Wallwey I'd gladly pay you $.02 to quit spouting this bull in comp.arch. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Curtis Yarvin |\ | / "That is not dead which can eternal lie, | cs132074@cs.brown.edu | \|/ And with strange aeons even Death may die." | Shave the Fuzzies! | /|\ -Abdul Alhazred, _Necronomicon_ ----------- |/ | \ The Humongous Fungus is Among us! | ------------------------------------------------------------------|
irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide') (04/08/90)
In article <00934B21.5FB703E0@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU> sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney) writes: > >I suspect you will see the SparcStation II come in as the same price point >as the Sparcstation II, and the SparcStation I will be sold at a 40% lower >price than originally sold. > >This is the same strategy which DEC is taking with the DECStation 3100/5000 >series; the DECstation 5000 is coming in at around the price point of the >original 3100 and the 3100 is taking a nose dive in price. The following quote is from the March 1990 issue of UNIX World, page 20: "... The price for single-user UNIX workstations will drop below $3000 this year, says Dataquest analyst Rikki Kirzner, putting further pressure on PCs. Companies most likely to break the $3000 barrier include Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, according to Kirzner...." It seems to me that HP has almost broken the $5000 barrier already. We have several HP9000/340s. The price after educational discount but including 23% Swedish sales tax is about $5300. The price ought to be lower in the US. Bo
wallwey@boulder.Colorado.EDU (WALLWEY DEAN WILLIAM) (04/09/90)
>Actually, PM's look was derived from Motif, and is gradually moving >toward it. > Not so. I gant you that the latest version of PM has the "chisel-3D" effect was derrived from Motif, but the way the general look----mostly the way the resizing of the window boarders are and iconify, maximize buttons, etc... CAME FROM PM and MS-Windows. Dean Wallwey
bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) (04/11/90)
>How many 286/386/486 chips are bought every year? How many SPARC chips? > >-- >Phil Ngai, phil@amd.com {uunet,decwrl,ucbvax}!amdcad!phil I don't understand your point, are you saying that it's the cost of the CPU chip (lowered by high volume) which makes cheaper RISC systems impossible? I don't think that bears up under scrutiny. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | {xylogics,uunet}!world!bzs | bzs@world.std.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD
phil@pepsi.amd.com (Phil Ngai) (04/11/90)
In article <1990Apr10.221406.13391@world.std.com> bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes: |>How many 286/386/486 chips are bought every year? How many SPARC chips? | |I don't understand your point, are you saying that it's the cost of |the CPU chip (lowered by high volume) which makes cheaper RISC systems |impossible? I don't think that bears up under scrutiny. CPU chips, motherboard chip sets, associated peripheral chips. Just as one example, look at all the competition in the PC graphics area. Everyone has a VGA chip. There are half a dozen 8514 clones going on. As a result, you can buy a vanilla VGA controller for just a little over $100. Now if you want to talk about a useful computer, then there's the matter of software... -- Phil Ngai, phil@amd.com {uunet,decwrl,ucbvax}!amdcad!phil The War on Drugs is the modern day Inquisition.