AIX on 3090

[Jack F. Vogel]

In article <289 at dgsi.UUCP> brian at dgsi.UUCP (Brian Kelley/10000000) writes:
 
[ my opinions on 3090 being a fast unix platform deleted...]

>That's not what I heard.  At least the word on the street is it's really slow.
>Well not *REALLY* slow, but only about twice as fast as a $10,000 DEC Station
>3100.

I don't know what the source of this opinion was or how the comparison was
made. I suspect there are some isolated tests or activities that might
produce something like this but I also think it would be misleading. One
needs to evaluate performance in a more system-oriented way than how many
dhrystones the cpu can crank, at least that's my opinion. Anyone familiar
with 370 systems knows that where they shine is batch I/O processing power.
I doubt that the Dec Station could match 32 or more channels pumping 5Meg/sec
to and from DASD. Also the Dec or other workstation has main storage in the
10's of Megabytes, the 3090 can have 512 Meg (It is fairly common for systems
to have 256). The 3090 also has something called extended storage which is
slower ram used as a paging device (not that you'd page that often with that
much real storage :-}), this can extend into the gigabytes. You can therefore
run processes on these beasts that you could never even dream of on your
workstation. For example, it is common these days to do the graphic VLSI
circuit design on a workstation but this is just the graphic frontend, when
it comes to the real processing it is necessary to have the mainframe class
system to accomplish it. That's why Intel designed the 486 running AIX on
the 3090, it wasn't due to liking Big Blue, they just had to have a system with
this kind of power. Well enough of my rambling, you get the idea.


> I've also heard that IBM will not let anyone disclose performance
>figures for the system.  How about some dhrystones?  Seriously, are there
>industry standard benchmark results available from somewhere?  How much
>does a typical 3090-600 cost? 
 
 
IBM marketing will, as far as I know, be releasing performance data for
AIX/370 when the product becomes generally available. I think its normal
procedure for a customer given an early release of a product to be under
non-disclosure on things like performance due to the very fact that it is
pre-released code, so there is nothing unusual about this. On the question
of how much a 3090 costs, well you'll have to talk to your IBM rep about
that, although I believe its one of those kinds of products where if you
have to ask about the price you can't afford it :-} :-}!

Disclaimer: These opinions are mine, not necessarily Locus' or IBM's.

--
Jack F. Vogel			jackv at seas.ucla.edu
AIX Technical Support	              - or -
Locus Computing Corp.		jackv at ifs.umich.edu