What is "high speed"? I've got a Xilinx Spartan II that I've run some tests 
on at 75Mhz (actually a bit faster to get the correct XGA timing but you 
get the idea) The 4000/90A runs at 83Mhz. Now a Virtex-E running at 500Mhz 
w/ 5 Million gates is a $6,000 qty 1 chip, but it is available.

But all that aside, I agree to develop a VAX microarchitecture that comes 
close to the 9000 won't happen very quickly. But if you accept that chips 
do get faster/denser on a fairly exponential curve then one could 
presumably synthesize said VAX and wait for the chip technology to catch up.

Has anyone benchmarked SimH yet? I wonder how many VUPs it clocks in at.

--Chuck

At 03:41 PM 2/26/02, you wrote:
>On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 06:13:23PM -0500, Gunther Schadow wrote:
> > Hello, for those of you who are not (or no longer :-) subscribed to the
> > Quasijarus list, you still want to read this. This is Michael Sokolov
> > as we all love him: Passionate and knowledgeable about VAXen, and just
> > that. The project sounds kinda cool, if he delivers I'll want to get it.
>
>Oh, yeah, sure, if you ignore everything about it that's wildly at odds
>with reality.  Care to tell me how he's going to make his FPGA with his
>new VAX core on it run at anywhere near the clock rates the later VAXen
>ran at?