Questions about Pyramid/Sequent

[Carl S. Gutekunst]

In article <404 at sequoia.UUCP> dewey at sequoia.UUCP (Dewey Henize) writes:
>I will say, though, that on occasion I've been able to tell that having
>the extra processors seems to make a large difference - several jobs have
>been running using very high proportions of a couple of the CPUs and the
>fact we had other CPUs available pretty well 'hid' this from the rest
>of the users.

This is a classic architectural question that the salescritters will belabor
endlessly. Which is "better": a machine with a larger number of smaller CPUs
(Sequent, Encore Multimax) or a smaller number of larger CPUs (Arix, Alliant,
Celerity, CCI, DEC, Elxsi, Encore's new systems, Pyramid)?

The idea of a large number of smaller processors was really radical at the
time; and Sequent earned a lot of well deserved press for it. I'd long felt
the old Balance was an ideal machine for introductory programming courses,
simply because it was more difficult for one user to screw the others by
soaking up all the CPU. Unfortunately, the same argument can also be used
to buying a flock of IBM PCs. Recently Sequent has been going after OLTP, a
market which I thought they should have been chasing long ago; here, the
multiple small CPUs make more sense.

The other side is that there simply are applications where you need to have
that large CPU. Many problems simply can't be broken down and spread across
multiple processors. And when users are running really parallel stuff, you
can as solidly kill a multi-CPU machine well as its single CPU breatheren.
Then there's the night-owls like me, who expect the machine to be damn fast
when there's no one else on it.

Anybody want to voice their thoughts on this one? I make the silly things,
so I don't know what most people are interested it.

<csg>