Subject: Re: ballpark ratio users:cpu for a [345]86 NetBSD box?
To: Dave McGuire <>
From: grantham <>
List: current-users
Date: 09/27/1994 15:55:54
>   I didn't say they were "bad machines"...I *love* 'em myself, I just
> have this thing about using them for what they were designed to do.
> Do you know the difference between a car and a truck, man?

This isn't a very good analogy.

If my car has twice the engine power, twice the space in the trunk,
and twice the traction in the tires (not to mention that is was designed
from the beginning to be more comfortable) than your truck, the difference
is that my car will perform better than your truck, even though it has
a name befitting a smaller vehicle.

> > So what is the explanation you can give for why the old stuff is
> > better for you?
>   Again...You tell me.  It works.  Very well.  Much better than the
> efforts of competitors trying to shoehorn it into desktop
> workstations.  YOU TELL ME, man!  I'm open to your explanation!

I suspect it was bad engineering, on someone's part.  There is no
magic that will make up for

	1) better IO bandwidth
	2) better CPU power
	3) more memory
	4) better bus and logic design
	5) better software

no matter how much you guys flame back and forth.  In this case,
I'd have to suspect that the newer OS was at fault, probably
something having to do with context switching, virtual memory,
or configuration of some sort.  Maybe you had people running
multiple xtanks on the Sparc 10's?

As years pass, not only does speed/throughput per dollar grow, but the
rate of growth also increases.  A Pentium-90 PCI with a SCSI-2 adapter
and FDDI is a hell of a lot faster than the top-of-the-line 66MHz EISA
SCSI-2 16-bit Ethernet machine I bought last April, and the 66MHz machine
is now the internet server for dozens of undergraduate students at a
time, over ordinary ethernet.

I'm curious; what are you doing on these 4/???s?  Can you think
of any reason they would beat a Sparc 10?

Brad Grantham, >+------+< Happily slaved to NetBSD/Mac68k!
MacBSD : II, IIx, IIcx, IIci, SE/30, IIsi, IIvx -- The list is growing...