rhg@NCoast.ORG (Rich Garrett) (05/03/91)
I would appreciate any comments that you might provide me regarding the pros and cons of the Motorola 88k boxes. We are in the process of evaluation for a major committment and your comments would be welcome! If you prefer to leave a message on voice mail, I can be reached at (216) 778-6211 extension 316. Thank you! Rich Garrett -- Richard H. Garrett rhg@ncoast.ORG NCoast Public Access UN*X - (216) 582-2460, 1200/2400 baud, login: makeuser
hlt@napcc (Harold L. Trammel) (05/04/91)
rhg@NCoast.ORG (Rich Garrett) writes: >I would appreciate any comments that you might provide me regarding >the pros and cons of the Motorola 88k boxes. We are in the process of >evaluation for a major committment and your comments would be welcome! >Thank you! >Rich Garrett I would also like to hear comments, particularly on the MPC-300. It appears to be a bargin for us ( university discounts+3 19" NCD X-terminals + bundled software ). I have read some negative references to these boxes in previous notes but most were developmental issues rather than user issues. This seems like an ideal forum to air the comments. Thanks, Harold ======================================================================== Harold L. Trammel | hlt@napcc.cvm.uiuc.edu National Animal Poison Control Center | (128.174.187.6) College of Veterinary Medicine | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | Urbana, IL | ========================================================================
jat@xavax.com (John Tamplin) (05/05/91)
In article <1991May3.025918.15920@NCoast.ORG> rhg@NCoast.ORG (Rich Garrett) writes: >I would appreciate any comments that you might provide me regarding >the pros and cons of the Motorola 88k boxes. We are in the process of >evaluation for a major committment and your comments would be welcome! > >If you prefer to leave a message on voice mail, I can be reached at >(216) 778-6211 extension 316. > >Thank you! > >Rich Garrett Xavax is a subsidiary of Crystal Data Systems, and we are a Motorola reseller, so take these comments as you wish. I have personally used Suns 3's & 4's, IBM RS/6000's, and DEC uVaxen in addition to Motorola Unix systems. The thing that has most impressed me about the Motorola systems is the robustness of their Unix port. We have been running a system based on the 181 board (read: old) for a little over a year. During that time, the system has crashed or had to be shut down to solve some hung problem only twice since we upgraded the OS, and about 3 times running the original OS (which had beta networking code, which was where the problem was). In my experience with the other systems mentioned above, I had never seen a machine last that long. Our system in-house has 8M on the processor board and 8M of VME RAM, which is much slower. Even so, the machine is quite fast compared to the competition. We also get demo units from Motorola on occasion -- including a dual processor machine with 64M of RAM which was blindingly fast (GNUchess evaluates around 4500 nodes/sec on that machine!). From a programmer's point of view, I was most unimpressed with UniSoft's work on the OS (Motorola has since taken over the job themselves). The header files had stuff defined in the wrong places and the files were not protected against multiple inclusion. I fixed all this myself by using the BSD header files as a guide to what should be defined where -- the system will now compile most PD sources (BSD or SYSV) without modification. The Green Hills C compiler has some problems, but I am running GCC without difficulty. The I/O subsystem is quite good and I have been *very* impressed with database capabilities of the machine using Informix-OnLine. The newer machines (based on the 188 board and the 328 SCSI controller) should do quite a bit better. Using the high-performance filesystem (which clusters blocks for file allocation purposes similar to the Berkeley FFS), filesystem I/O regularly is around 550kb/s, and raw I/O approaches disk speed. Again, this is on a system that is somewhat slower than current systems. The serial ports can maintain 38.4kbps on all channels simultaneously, and support hardware flow control very well. In general, all of Motorola's peripherals have there on processors to offload interrupt overhead from the 88k(s). The Ethernet card, for example, runs the entire TCP/IP stack. The documentation with the system is excellent (at least for a programmer/ developer), including schematic diagrams and enough info to talk directly to the peripheral cards. The only real complaint I have deals with development: the C compiler (GHS) is not terribly good and the header files were all screwed up. Both of those problems were fixable, and I haven't found much else to complain about. Overall, I have been very impressed with the system and have no problems recommending it to my friends. I do sortof feel that the system is somewhat overpriced (compared to what you could build it for, not necessarily the competition), but the systems are rock-solid. -- John Tamplin Xavax jat@xavax.COM 2104 West Ferry Way ...!uunet!xavax!jat Huntsville, AL 35801