Re: is Vax addressing sane today

jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:

In article <2024Sep7.104440@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:
>

Sure, there was marketing pressure to deliver 64-bit architectures
early, but I think that a competetive 32-bit OoO VAX in 1996 with an
announcement of a future 64-bit extension would have been fine
wrt. marketing.  And a 0.25um 64-bit VAX in 1999 or 2000 (they
shrank the 21264 to 0.25um in 1999) would have certainly made good
on that promise.

>
VAX had initially been very successful for the late 1970s and early 1980s
in technical computing, because it was performance-competitive and had a
better operating system than any of the other superminis of the time.
>
Then multiple RISCs with Unix came along, which were cheaper, had equal
or better performance, and a satisfactory operating system. Those ate
DEC's technical computing market quite fast, but its business IT market
lasted longer.
>
The technical computing market was /much/ more interested in 64-bit than
the business IT market. When I got involved at a software supplier for
technical computing in 1995, VAX was not performance-competitive and was
on the way out, but Alpha was the fastest thing around until Pentium Pro,
stayed competitive for a couple more years, and didn't die out completely
until 2002 or so.
>
DEC seem to have concluded in 1988 that they could not keep VAX
performance competitive with the RISCs of the time at a competitive price.

Not really.  They were still burning lots of money on the VAX 9000, a
dead end.

They stopped doing new VAX designs after the NVAX/NVAX+ was introduced
in 1991 (Alpha was introduced in 1992).  There was the NVAX++ shrink
that improved the clock rate.

Also, 64-bit ASAP was necessary to retain their part of the technical
computing market and try to win some of it back.
>
Trying to hold on with VAX, in the hope technology would emerge that
would make it practical, without a clear idea of when or what that would
be is not something that shareholders will tolerate for very long.

They tolerated it for Intel and for IBM.  Ok, IBM introduced Power for
the technical market, maybe that would have been the way to go for
DEC: continue with MIPS for the technical market, and continue with
VAX for the business market.

The Alpha with VMS and with translation to run VAX (and DecStation)
software sounds plausible, but somehow it did not work, neither for
keeping the technical nor the business customers, even though Alpha
was very competetive until the late 1990s.

Maybe the business customers would not have defected without the
VAX->Alpha transition, or maybe they would still have defected (they
were DEC customers instead of IBM customers for a reason).

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>