cowan@udel-relay.arpa (03/01/84)
From: Ken Cowan <cowan@udel-relay.arpa> I have seen the MicroVAX announcements from DEC. Customer shipments of prepackaged systems are supposed to begin in March. I haven't heard anything about the availability of the chip set. The comparison to the VAX 11/780 couldn't have been for the whole system. The MicroVAX is Q-bus based, which slows the system. It also runs off of a winchester that is much slower than the disks shipped with 11/780 systems. There are also some memory management things done in software, most notably the page table translation; which is done in hardware (microcode?) in the 11/780. However, the MicroVAX sounds like a super machine if you are running an LSI-11/23 size application that needs to grow to 32-bit virtual address type architecture.