Differences between a 3B5 and a 3B15

[Steve Losen]

In article <463 at vsi.UUCP> friedl at vsi.UUCP (Stephen J. Friedl) writes:
>Hi folks,
>
>     One of my customers is upgrading his 3B5 to a 3B15, and I am
>wondering what kinds of performance improvements we can expect.
>He currently has 700MB of disk and 6MB of RAM, and will likely
>just be swapping processor boards.  We do very disk intensive
>work and find the 3B5 quite reasonable:  the upgrade is not
>being done exclusively for performance reasons -- support, SVR3
>and expandability are big issues as well.  I would appreciate
>hearing (via email) from others who have made this switch.
>--
>Steve Friedl           V-Systems, Inc.            *Hi Mom*
>friedl at vsi.com {uunet,ihnp4}!vsi.com!friedl attmail!friedl

We upgraded about 10 3b5's to 3b15's.  The virtual memory speeds
things up noticably (I have no hard numbers) and since our 3b5's
had no MAUs, floating point operations on the 15's are obviously
several orders of magnatude faster.

BEWARE!!!  If you intend to run SVR3 (unavailable for 3b15's yet
as far as I know) you'll probably need to do another hardware upgrade.
Evidently SVR3 requires new hardware that our upgraded 3b15's don't
have.  Furthermore, we recently got some new 3b15's and these will
also require hardware upgrades for SVR3 :-(

We are running release 2.1.2 and this probably won't run on the
"suitable for release 3" version of the 3b15.  Talk to AT&T
to get the whole scoop.  You might want to wait for release 3 to
come out before upgrading your 3b5's to save yourself some bucks.
-- 
Steve Losen     scl at virginia.edu
University of Virginia Academic Computing Center