auxiliary processor black boxes

[Stephen Daniel]

A company called Avalon out on the west coast makes a unibus
board that you plug into your vax.  It has an 8mhz 32016 processor
and 1Mbyte of memory.  It comes with a little kernel that talks
to a 4.2bsd device driver (also supplied) so that it may implement all
system calls by talking to a process running on your vax.
It costs about $10K (quantity 1).  For an extra $1K you can get a
cross compiler.  Then you can have a lot of fun.

You take any compute bound C program whose working set size is
less than one megabyte (paging is expensive for this beast)
and go
	acc -o program program.c	(run cross compiler)
	program -options		(run your program on the avalon).

Porting code is very easy.  The btye ordering is even the same
as a vax.  Except for one gross program, everything we've tried
has just compiled and run the first time.  We are in the midst of
expanding the list of programs we run on it, but currently I
think we use it for yacc, lex, ccom (the guts of the C compiler)
and ditroff.
In the past we used it to do some raster processing for an ink jet
printer, but we've since bought a dedicated raster box for that printer.

Raw speed is about .5x an unloaded 780 on typical programs.
This means that with any normal load factor you win big.

More details on request.
Enjoy.

		Stephen Daniel (decvax!mcnc!swd) (swd at mcnc)