5800 Upgrade -- Some Oddities in Pricing

[Steve Simmons]

Thanks much for the postings, George.  Being the moderately
proud owner of a 5810, I was most interested in the SMP and
upgrade data.  Some of the number struck me as most odd, tho.
Pulling things apart and putting them together, we get:

>DECsystem 5810 Computer
>
>R3000 processor and R3010 floating point coprocessor w/32 Mbytes
>ECC memory 64 Kbytes instruction cache, 64 Kbytes data cache, 256
>Kbytes second-level data and instruction cache, 560 Mybtes
>internal disk storage, TK70 296-Mbyte streaming tape drive, embedded
>802.3 Ethernet adapter . . .

5820, 5830, 5840 minimal configs are same, just more cpus.

>    o System Prices:
>      - DECsystem 5810 $75,000
>      - DECsystem 5820 $115,000
>      - DECsystem 5830 $140,000
>      - DECsystem 5840 $160,000
>
>    o Upgrade Prices:
>      In-cabinet upgrades . . . 
>      - DECsystem 5810 to DECsystem 5820 upgrade -- $50,000
>      - DECsystem 5820 to DECsystem 5830 upgrade -- $50,000
>      - DECsystem 5830 to DECsystem 5840 upgrade -- $50,000

What's wrong with this picture?

It's probably cheaper to buy a second 5810 and cannibalize it than
to buy a second CPU for a 5810.  With the cannibalizing you get

  o  an additional 32MB of ram, 
  o  a second disk and tape controller,
  o  a second BI bus,
  o  a second TK70 tape drive,
  o  an additional .5GB of disk.

What to bet those cost more than $25,000?  And you've got an XMI
bus, backplane, and Ultrix licence to sell.  Yeeesh.  Or you could
run 2 5810s, NFS them together, and have better overall reliability.
Gads.

If we ever go to negotionate an upgrade with DEC the negotiations
are gonna be *fun*.