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From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: is Vax addressing sane today
Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2024 15:52:17 GMT
Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
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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>