davin@me.utoronto.ca (Davin Yap) (04/09/90)
I hope someone at IBM will answer this. I just received some performance
analyses from DEC about their new DECstation 5000. For the most part it
was as I expected. The 5000 has roughly the same integer performance of
a POWERstation 320 (I'm getting sick of upper/lower case names), but is
only half as quick with the floating point stuff. Fine, we'll buy the
IBMs. Wait! Let's look over the Graphics Performance Analysis.
The only numbers I'm interested in are those of the 320 and 5000 both
with the minimum hardware for an 8-bit colour frame buffer. The machines
we buy will be used in an undergraduate CAD/CAE lab, so we're sensitive
to graphics performance, but can't afford the high end graphics hardware
options. For what a number's worth, the 5000 provides 3.3 times the
overall graphics performance of a 320, running pre-release software.
That's the catch, the tests on the 320 were run 3/26/90, assuming that
they were using the latest revision of AIX 3.1, how much better will the
graphics performance of the 320 get, when using the low-end color
adapter? I should like to add that DEC was also running a pre-release
version of Ultrix on the 5000 and that they expect graphics performance
to increase when Ultrix 4.0 becomes available.
In any case, I'm going to price the 5000 on Monday.
Prompt replies would be appreciated.
Davin
--
Davin Yap, Center for Computer Integrated Engineering, University of Toronto
davin@me.utoronto.ca davin@me.utoronto.bitnet | 5 King's College Rd., Toronto
...{pyramid,uunet}!utai!utme!davin | Ontario, CANADA, M5S 1A4
PS: sorry if you see this twice, me thinks nn is buggy.