Risc System/6000

[Peter S. Ford]

IBM's strategy for unbundling LAN and disk  adaptors and software is not
uncommon for the industry.  I can never understand why people see unbundling
as the GREAT evil.  Is it that hard to read the price list and sum up the
total cost and THEN do your comparisons?  I seem to remember people
slamming NeXT for not letting you buy a machine w/o an optical disk.

wrt benchmarks.  We have run over 10 science codes on the RS6000 and
it is usually  4 times faster than a Sparcstation.  No SPECmarks,
no FLOPS, no XXXpacks, just 4 times faster.  Your mileage may vary.  
This is the 520 model, which
is the 20 MHz version of the machine and has a shallower data cache than
the 25 & 30 MHz models.

re screen sizes.  All screens are 1280x1024.

If you want a cheaper (albeit slower) machine you still buy a 3100 or 
a SparcStation.  If you need floating pt crunch, it looks like the RS 6000
is a good choice (you may want to llok at the MIPS R/6000 as well,
although not as a desktop workstation).

Peter Ford, Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos



--
Peter Ford
MS-B258
Center for Nonlinear Studies
Los Alamos, NM 87545
peter at lanl.gov