pavlov@canisius.UUCP (Greg Pavlov) (02/19/91)
In article <1991Feb13.133449.27655@rodan.acs.syr.edu>, jareed@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Judith Ann Reed) writes: > > Greetings! > I am trying to make meaningful comparisons between the following purchase > options: > > 1. DEC's Decstation 5000/200 vs. Sun's Sparcstation 2 vs. IBM's RS6000/320 vs. > possibly some model of Silicon Graphics server/workstation > > 2. One of the above workstations/servers with 2 X terminals and a Mac running > X windows vs. 3 smaller UNIX workstations (i.e. Decstation 2100's) and a Mac > running x windows. > Re your first question, "UNIX Review" does an indepth review of one or two systems per month: you may want to check the recent year's issues, because I believe that they covered at least three of the machines (or one of their "cousins") during that period. My personal opinion is that these reviews are consistently the best series that I have seen, tho in the case of the RS6000, others have claimed that multiuser performance is not very good. If floating point performance is your primary criteria, then the ranking would have to be IBM followed by DEC and Silicaon Graphics, with SUN a distant third. Re your second question, DECStation 2100's aren't bad, but you may want to see if the rumored announcement of a replacement does come through as expec- ted during the next 3-4 weeks. If the rumor mills are to be believed, the cpu will be the same as the one in the 5000 but run at a higher clock rate. greg pavlov, fstrf, amherst, ny pavlov@stewart.fstrf.org