LARRY@JPL-VLSI.ARPA (05/07/84)
From: Larry Carroll <LARRY@JPL-VLSI.ARPA> Comparing 68000s and VAXen is risky business. On some computational benchmarks 68000s run .3 to .6 of a VAX, on I/O-intensive jobs 68000s are usually left far behind. And is the 68000 like the Lisa-2 with the CPU having a part of almost every task, or does it farm out its load among special-purpose co-processors? Any upgrade has to take into account just what the upgrade is for. If your system has a lot of matrix math to do a VAX with an array processor may be what you need. If you have a lot of screen-oriented text editors or bit-mapped graphics it's a lot more cost-effective to have a bunch of Lisa-2s hooked to your VAX so it isn't in danger of switching contexts for a single byte or bit. The general principle is to use as much parallel processing as you can. ------