[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[FredK]

"Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88 at comcast.net> wrote in message 
news:QcidnRdqdO1q85HWnZ2dnUVZ_o2dnZ2d at giganews.com...
> FredK wrote:
>>
>>
>> Gads.  Take this as a lesson: had they been able to produce nVAX on time, 
>> there wouldn't have been a need for Alpha.
>
> That's highly questionable.  It was already known that a RISC architecture 
> plus an optimizing compiler could blow the doors off a CISC system.
>

There is more to selling systems than raw speed.  When SUN was selling 
13,000 workstations a year, DEC was selling 5000 VAXstation 2000's a month - 
the limit of  capacity.  Note that Alpha didn't kill the x86, nor did Power, 
or Sparc, or PA-RISC.  But the real point here is that nVAX was 
"competetive", but too late to prevent the shift that occured during the 
long, long period of time the the VAX was uncompetetive.  Nobody really 
knows what a 3GHz VAX with modest changes to the architecture might be 
capable of today.

But all that is beside the point.  I also said in a different point that I 
believe that essentially the VAX running out of gas was inevitable.  Even if 
it was made faster, the 32-bit VA space was a limitation for the servers - 
and technical workstations.  Alpha was a brilliant design.  I still consider 
the EV7 probably the finest chip set ever designed.  But Alpha came too late 
for VMS, it had lost momentum inside and outside the company.

> Are there *any* CISC systems being manufactured today?  Even the 80x86 
> family is RISC at the core; the CISC instruction set is layered on top of 
> a RISC processor.
>

Define "RISC" and then apply it to the current processors being designed 
today.  You are obsessing here about the instruction set - when the point of 
your last sentence is that the instruction set doesn't matter, just the 
underlying core that implements the instruction set presented to the system.