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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!lll-winken.llnl.gov!enews.sgi.com!mcsun!EU.net!Austria.EU.net!siemens.at!not-for-mail From: mingo@pc5829.hil.siemens.at (Ingo Molnar) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Solaris vs SunOs Date: 3 Sep 1996 16:53:25 GMT Organization: Siemens AG Austria Lines: 46 Message-ID: <50hnq5$nn2@zwei.siemens.at> References: <4vabsr$4mt@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> <321A5DF4.FF6D5DF@FreeBSD.org> <4vf6dq$sgj@panix.com> <4vfist$kv@hermes.acs.unt.edu> <4vji3t$6f1@symiserver2.symantec.com> <4vsofi$ngd@qnx.com> <500vcg$a22@symiserver2.symantec.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: firix.siemens.at X-Newsreader: TIN [UNIX 1.3 unoff BETA release 960808] tedm@agora.rdrop.com wrote: : At least, 2 years after I buy the computer I can go on to reuse the "VGA" monitor : (assuming I get a good one to begin with) with a new machine. With the Sun : monitor, unless I get a new Sun I throw the monitor away. I'm quite positive that you can use these fixed-frequency Sun monitors with 'SVGATextMode' [a utility for Linux], though i've never tried it. : CISC chips have taken most of the good stuff that gave RISC the advantage : and so there is not as much difference anymore. In any case, the biggest : advantage of all the RISC workstations was not the CPU, it was that they all : used fancy high-speed busses that would run rings around the miserable : speed of the ISA bus. [i already regret that i start the RISC/CISC flamewar :)] RISC core CISC chips were good when memory was expensive. Now that memory prices are low, i think highspeed chips like the Alpha get viable. What made me shudder two years ago was that the OSF/1 kernel was 8MB and each executable was twice as big as on a CISC-ish machine. Now that doesnt make much difference. And a clean RISC design is much faster. Alpha is at 500MHz now, and Intel had to announce their ridiculous 1GHz vaporchip. Now instruction compression doesnt buy you much but increased CPU die size and lower throughput, so there is a real technological gap between RISC and CISC/RISC machines. Maybe some RISC vendor combines this with some cool x86 emulation/dynamic translation technology, and cuts off Intel's high end profits. : from reality and buy everyone a brand new Sun or SGI every year. Most other : businesses look at it from a pure cost justification, and if they can save 70% : of the cost of the computer and lose 15% of the functionality they are going : to do it. yes. the only barrier so far was that there was no server-size x86 chip. With the P6 this has changed significantly. This is a big chance for NT, and a big chance for the free unices. And i still see a factor of 2-3 between the costs of developing software under NT and under a free Unix, so maybe the latter will win :) And there are some software things that i consider impossible to implement under NT, without taking a huge cost hit. -- mingo