Sun 386i opinions

[Peter Shenkin]

wwc at boole.ece.wisc.edu (William W. Carlson) writes:
:>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 30, message 4 of 12
:>4.  In my opinion, the 386i can't be beat on a price/performance basis.
:>    Just looking at drystones, which of course should be taken with a
:>    grain of sodium chloride, the 386i/250 significantly outperforms
:>    any other sun except the 4 series.....
:>    ..... For my work, which mainly involves integer
:>    calculations, drystones are not too bad a benchmark and from my
:>    personal experience the 386i is really a performer.
:>	Bill Carlson

I use my 386i for floating-point calculations and am equally impressed.
It's fully twice as fast as a Sun 3-180 on my production program, which is
heavily floating point.  That makes the 386i fully twice as fast as a VAX
11/780fpa for this application.  I'm happy.  I got the machine, with 327mB
drive, 8Mb main memory, for under $18k with academic discount.  The 16"
flat-screen Sony color monitor is great.

Peter S. Shenkin, Department of Chemistry, Barnard College, Columbia University
New York, NY   10027  NEW TEL !!: (212) 854-1418 (work);  (212) 829-5363 (home)
shenkin at cubsun.bio.columbia.edu    shenkin%cubsun.bio.columbia.edu at cuvmb.BITNET