rickka@xmarketing.wv.tek.COM (07/27/89)
In response to your queries on X terminals, the following is a brief
description of the present products available from Tektronix. They were
announced at Xhibition on June 26th.
TEKTRONIX XN11 COLOR X STATION
Base Price:
$6995
Projected Availibity:
November 1989
XServer:
X.V11R3 based
Limited backing store (not using sample server for backing
store; writing to obscured errors will cause exposure events)
Screen Attributes:
PseudoColor; 4 planes standard, 8 optional
16" screen (standard) -- 1024 x 768 pixels
19" screen (optional) -- 1024 x 768 pixels
Processors:
Intel 386SX (16 MHz) and Texas Instruments 34010 (50 MHz)
Networks:
Ethernet TCP/IP (thick wire only)
Other Attributes:
Support for local peripheral devices, including serial
and parallel output devices.
TEKTRONIX XN5 X STATION
Base Price:
$2795
Projected Availibity:
August 1989
XServer:
X.V11R3 based with backing store
Screen Attributes:
MonoChrome
16" screen -- 1024 x 1024 pixels
Processors:
Motorola 68000 (12.5 MHz)
Networks:
Ethernet TCP/IP, DECNET (thin or thick wire)
Other Notes:
Tektronix and NCD have entered a relationship whereby
Tektronix distributes the NCD16 as the XN5.
For more information:
Rick Kamp
Tektronix, Inc.
Visual Systems Group
P O Box 1000, DS 60-850
rickka@orca.WV.tek.com
(503)685-2728jonnyg@umd5.umd.edu (Jon Greenblatt) (07/27/89)
In article <8907262112.AA02496@xmarketing.WV.TEK.COM> rickka@xmarketing.wv.tek.COM writes: >In response to your queries on X terminals, the following is a brief >description of the present products available from Tektronix. They were >announced at Xhibition on June 26th. > > >TEKTRONIX XN11 COLOR X STATION > > Base Price: > $6995 > > Projected Availibity: > November 1989 > > XServer: > X.V11R3 based > Limited backing store (not using sample server for backing > store; writing to obscured errors will cause exposure events) > > Screen Attributes: > PseudoColor; 4 planes standard, 8 optional > 16" screen (standard) -- 1024 x 768 pixels > 19" screen (optional) -- 1024 x 768 pixels > This does not impress me! For a couple of thousand $ less ? if your are an academic institution you can get a 6152 IBM RT system which is much better. The 8514 driver for the 6152 system is probably the fastest color X windows system in existance. 6152 COLOR X STATION WITH A 8514 MONITOR Base price: $5k-7k? Projected Availability: Has been available since late '88 XServer: X.V11R3 Fully implemented. Real Backing Store/Save unders. Fairly well debugged. (Very fast!) Screen Attributes: Full color: 8 planes, Large color Pallet (24 bit ?) 1024 x 768 pixels 15" screen. Processor: RISC RT/PC card Intel 286 system for IO processing and DOS. Network: Ethernet/Token Ring. Also: Full 4.3 bsd. NFS, AFS, etc... Can be used as a PS2 model 60 running DOS. 1 or 2 70-110 meg hard disks. I am not sure of the accuracy of all the details but you get the Idea. We have purchaced a lot of these at Maryland. I use mine as an X11 terminal for my lager model 125 RT, under these conditions I have an extreemly fast environment. Can anyone top this for the money? Can anyone top this period? NOTE: Please don't use this post alone to make monitary decisions. I might be much more bias than I realize. JonnyG. (jonnyg@rover.umd.edu) DISCLAIMER: These are my person veiws and do not necessarily reflect those of IBM or the University of Maryland.
joel@pandora.pa.dec.com (Joel McCormack) (07/27/89)
From jonnyg@rover.umd.edu: This does not impress me! For a couple of thousand $ less ? if your are an academic institution you can get a 6152 IBM RT system which is much better. The 8514 driver for the 6152 system is probably the fastest color X windows system in existance. ... Can anyone top this for the money? Can anyone top this period? From me: Top it for the money? I have no idea. Top it period? Try a color DECStation 3100, esp. running UWS 3.1 server. (Even better, running a field test 3.2 server.) And I suspect that a SparcStation with the new Sun server (in field test) will do pretty well, though I haven't seen numbers
jonnyg@AARDVARK.UMD.EDU (Jon Greenblatt) (07/28/89)
I've been getting some interesting responses about my comment on the 6152 systems. I would like to make a few points clear though. 1: The 6152 is a fast X11 server. It is not an exceptional UNIX system in terms of performance but it fairs pretty well 2: As far as I know it is only available to academic institutions. I'm not sure if a non acedemic institution can buy one. Academic discount is not an issue if the only people who can buy one are Academic institutions. 3: An X server on a much faster system will probably perform better but you also pay for speed. 4: The 8514 driver is fast and reasonably well debuged. I have not commented on AIX or other 4.3 drivers. I think IBM is getting on the ball with color X, in time I would not be surprized if more IBM X emulations were comparable. (LONG: dealing with X Ports in general) I hope I am not giving away any trade secrets here but I do know why the 8514 driver is so much faster than most other color drivers. When I first got X10 for my RT, the only color monitor we had at the time (IBMAPA8C) which only supported monochrome. Over time I hacked the mono server in vary small ways to produce a reasonably fast partial color emulation. The CFB code has been flamed for being incredably slow, I don't know if that has changed yet or not? One thing I did notice looking through the IBM distribution is that the color stuff uses mostly the MFB libraries and almost nothing from the CFB libraries. Being that my first color hack was to a mono server, I deduced IBM could have done it the same way. The source to this server is not available but the supporting source and symbol tables to the .o files were enough to figure out this was true. Has anyone else done work using the MFB code to produce color servers? It seems with most modern color hardware it should not be too hard. As long as you can set the READ/WRITE planes on the display and do one bit per pixel access you can use MFB code to write to color displays. I would realy like to see every one have fast color displays, I'm not proud. I have not looked at the CFB code closely but it seems to me that it is written for the lowest common denominator of color display. It seems using any real features on a color display would make the CFB code obsolete(?). If your hardware is one pixel per BYTE/WORD only I guess the CFB code is all you can use, it would prabably be faste those conditions anyway. I wrote a pseudo subset of X10 for the IBM PC and turned it into a non windowing graphics library. The code supported pixmaps and other hard to do things. The displays supported included EGA COLOR, EGA MONO, VGA, and MCGA and most graphics modes supported by each display. My driver code was basicaly split in half. One half of the code delt with one bit per pixel modes and the other half delt with one byte per pixel modes. There was very little difference between mono and color modes. Maybe instead of MFB being mono and CFB being color, MFB should be for bit mapped displays and CFB should be byte mapped diplays. I don't claim to be server guru, what I said may acualy be documented somewhere. I thought my observations would be of interest however. JonnyG.
rgs@spot.megatek.uucp (Rusty Sanders) (07/29/89)
From article <1626@bacchus.dec.com>, by joel@pandora.pa.dec.com (Joel McCormack): > From jonnyg@rover.umd.edu: > > ... > Can anyone top this for the money? > Can anyone top this period? > > > From me: > > Top it for the money? I have no idea. > > Top it period? Try a color DECStation 3100, esp. running UWS 3.1 server. (Even better, running > a field test 3.2 server.) And I suspect that a SparcStation with the new Sun server (in field > test) will do pretty well, though I haven't seen numbers I agree with the top it for the money comment. But topping it at all is easy. The DECstation is a fast box (faster than the new stuff from Sun, as best as I can tell). Also, from the numbers I have a new product from us (Megatek) is quite fast also (generally faster then the Decstation). It's an intelligent frame buffer that plugs into a standard Sun. Marketing has taken to calling it the "X-tra Console", because we support multiples of these on a single sun. Each framebuffer has its own keyboard, so they can end up kind of like expensive (but VERY fast) terminals. But the point here is that, as far as I've seen, I've not seen or heard of a faster color X around. The thing is CG4 compatible, so if you want really fast you can run in the mono screen (it zaphods). Not to sound like an add, but if anyone's interested you should come over to the Megatek booth at Siggraph. I'll be in the back of the booth with this thing, giving demos. Just look for the guy with the longish hair (in a pony tail, if I can figure out how to do that without my wife's help). ---- Rusty Sanders, Megatek Corp. --> rgs@megatek or... ...ucsd! ...hplabs!hp-sdd! ...ames!scubed! ...uunet!
meo@stiatl.UUCP (Miles O'Neal) (07/29/89)
In article <1626@bacchus.dec.com> joel@pandora.pa.dec.com (Joel McCormack) writes: | From jonnyg@rover.umd.edu: | This does not impress me! For a couple of thousand $ less ? if | your are an academic institution you can get a 6152 IBM RT system which is | much better. The 8514 driver for the 6152 system is probably the fastest color | X windows system in existance. | Top it period? Try a color DECStation 3100, esp. running UWS 3.1 server. (Even better, running a field test 3.2 server.) And I suspect that a SparcStation with the new Sun server (in field test) will do pretty well, though I haven't seen numbers Well, for B&W, the new DG AViiON makes our <386-based workstations>'s look like sleepy dogs...
bpendlet@esunix.UUCP (Bob Pendleton) (07/31/89)
From article <5131@umd5.umd.edu>, by jonnyg@umd5.umd.edu (Jon Greenblatt): > In article <8907262112.AA02496@xmarketing.WV.TEK.COM> rickka@xmarketing.wv.tek.COM writes: > > This does not impress me! For a couple of thousand $ less ? if >your are an academic institution you can get a 6152 IBM RT system which is >much better. The 8514 driver for the 6152 system is probably the fastest color >X windows system in existance. I love claims like this. Would you and the Tek folks please post xbench or x11perf results for these machines? OK kids, you wanna see whose faster? Take'm down to the track. Braggin' don't mean nothin'! :-) Bob P. -- - Bob Pendleton, speaking only for myself. - UUCP Address: decwrl!esunix!bpendlet or utah-cs!esunix!bpendlet - - Reality is stranger than most can imagine.