On Sat, 28 Aug 1999, Lord Isildur wrote:

> > If I was doing this, I'd use an existing Pentium socket (such as socket 7 
> > or 370).  No support chips to design.  Relatively known problem.  But
> > will sacrifice some on performance.
> 
>  but then were building a PeeCee with a VAX processor, thats gross!
> i want to take advantage of the power and beauty of the VAX architecture!

Exactly. The main reason the (smaller) VAXen outperformed IBM PC clones of the
day, was not so much the power of the CPU, but the I/O bandwidth. You could
(and still can!) connect loads of different devices to them, and they won't
complain. Having looked inside some MicroVAXen and a VAX 4000 now, I know that
it isn't just the bus architechture that causes this, but also the fact that
most of the I/O cards have their own onboard to take much of the load off the
CPU. It all seems to be a really well designed system, and I do think its a
real shame that development of these systems has stopped.

Paul
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