[rescue] Re: sunpci note: TWO cards now available

[Big Endian]

>On January 30, Brian Hechinger wrote:
>>  so who wants to resurect the VAX?  start making new VAX CPUs? :)
>
>   This has been discussed a bit here & there.  Remember the Mentec
>PDP11 deal...they're making *current technology* PDP11 hardware, and
>continuing to maintain the OSs.

How much faster are the new mentec -11s than the last DEC -11s?  What 
could they be compared to in terms of more modern vaxen or such?

>   Now, the VAX architecture is immensely more complex than the PDP11,
>but I would think it'd be doable.

its been done before with charon-vax hasn't it?

>   The hard part would be getting them to turn loose of it.  They know
>it's a good architecture, and they know it'd be a serious competitor
>to everything else out there if it were reimplemented with
>cutting-edge technology...so they might want to keep it "buried".

This is sad.  DECpaq now that they've announced the EOL for the Alpha 
and have discontinued the VAX long before that have dropped *ALL* 
their nice processor technology and are just Intel whores now.

>   They sold the PDP11 architecture when they thought it couldn't be made
>to compete with their more current stuff...which was mostly correct,
>largely due to the 22-bit address space limitation of the PDP11
>architecture.  This isn't so with the VAX...in fact, in my opinion,
>there are no inherent limitations in the VAX *architecture* (just the
>architecture) aside from perhaps being CISC and not handling IEEE
>floating point format (which could be added easily enough), that might
>keep it from being a sweet high-end modern processor.

How is CISC a limitation?  CISC is merely a design decision (place 
the burden on the compiler or the processor) isn't it?  the IEEE 
floating point should be relatively trivial to add if one designs a 
new VAX processor.  Some of the higher end vaxen used to have vector 
processors added to them, these could be integrated ala the G4.  What 
about scaling to 64 or 128bit?

daniel
-- 
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"Fragile. Do not drop." -- Posted on a Boeing 757.