Sun Rivals Blast SPARCstation 2 in UNIX TODAY!

[Jack C Dixon]

On page 88 of the Nov 12 issue of Unix Today there is an article titled
"Sun Rivals Blast SPARCstation 2".  I'll list a few quotes from the
article and hopefully someone out there familiar with the SPARC
architecture will comment on their accuracy.

"Sun Microsystems' competitors showed surprising unanimity in the nature
of their attacks on the SPARCstation 2 last week, saying that the product
demonstrates that the SPARC chip has reached its technological limit.

"... workstation manager at DEC, said that for Sun to achieve comparable
compute performance to DEC's newest workstation, it had to turn the
performance up to 40 MHz, a very high speed ... That puts the SPARC
technology near the high end of its performance capabilities.

"... program manager at HP/Apollo, noted that the SPARC chip appears to
have reached its limits to growth.  'They're running that thing at 40 MHz
generating 28 MIPS.  That's anemic.  That's bad.  That's terrible.' ...
'With Sun having that standardized SPARC, that hurt them.  They can't
innovate, and that chip is not very efficient.'"

Jack Dixon,  AT&T
{ ...!att!vogon!jcd, jcd at vogon.att.com }