jer@pender.ee.upenn.edu (Joel Ratsaby) (04/18/91)
I am a user on a multi-user Sun4 machine (Unix). My jobs seem to be too lengthy and are "niced" immediately after 2 CPU min. I am thinking about purchasing a 80486 machine. Does anyone knows or could point me to information about comparing 80486 "PCs" to not-only-PCs but mainframes ? if I could get a big improvement when running single-user on 80486 v.s. one-of-many users on Sun4 then it would be very "nice". --Joel
jcburt@ipsun.larc.nasa.gov (John Burton) (04/18/91)
In article <41449@netnews.upenn.edu> jer@pender.ee.upenn.edu (Joel Ratsaby) writes: > > I am a user on a multi-user Sun4 machine (Unix). My jobs seem > to be too lengthy and are "niced" immediately after 2 CPU min. > I am thinking about purchasing a 80486 machine. Does anyone knows or > could point me to information about comparing 80486 "PCs" to > not-only-PCs but mainframes ? if I could get a big improvement > when running single-user on 80486 v.s. one-of-many users on Sun4 > then it would be very "nice". > > --Joel You might take a look at the mag "Personal Workstation". Every month they do comparisons of various machines in several price ranges ( < $5000, $5000 < x < $10000, > $10000). At times it appears PW has a definite INTEL bias (seems that the majority of machines are 386/486 based.) But they do run reviews on other architectures (including SPARC, RISC, etc...). What you might look at is something like a Sun SparcStation 2, which is binary compatible to your Sun4, and can easily use your Sun4 as a file server...This would give you a single user (or multi user) workstation with almost the power of your Sun4 (perhaps more depending on the model of the Sun4) for slightly more money than you would spend for a 486 system...AND you wouldn't have to hassle with porting your programs to a different machine and different OS... Good Luck... John +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | John Burton | | G & A Technical Software | | jcburt@gatsibm.larc.nasa.gov | | jcburt@cs.wm.edu | | | | Disclaimer: Hey, what can I say...These are *my* views, not those | | of anyone else, be they employer, school, or government| +--------------------------------------------------------------------+