Re: MacIvory

[David Gadbois <gadbois@sygmund.cgs.utexas.edu>]

    Date: Tue, 6 Sep 88 17:58 PDT
    From: Spock@SAMSON.CADR.DIALNET.SYMBOLICS.COM (Spock)

	Date: Tue, 6 Sep 88 09:15 EDT
	From: Stever@IVORY.S4CC.Symbolics.COM (Stephen Robbins)

	    Date: Fri, 2 Sep 88 08:47 PDT
	    From: Mr.Spock@SAMSON.CADR.DIALNET.SYMBOLICS.COM (Mr. Spock)

		Date: Fri, 2 Sep 88 08:47 EDT
		From: Hornig@ALDERAAN.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Charles Hornig)

		The slowdown is due to the disks available for the Mac II being much
		slower than the disks Symbolics now sells on its 36xx line.

	    Well, that shoots the whole MacIvory down for me (rats!!).  We have a
	    3620 and it's slower than molasses.

	I was site manager at a site with a few 3620's a year or two ago.  We found
	that the apparent speed of a 3620 also depends a 1lot0 on the amount of physical
	memory you have on them.  There's a threshold below which they're so slow as to
	be almost unusable.  Above that threshold, though, they worked well for us.

	- Stephen

    What's the threshold?  We have 1.5 megawords on ours at the moment.  And
    I wonder what the "threshold" on the MacIvory is?

I was a bit puzzled by the talk of slow 3620's, since the one I work on
is quite a bit faster than some of the other lispms here at UT.  Extra
memory makes a huge difference -- the user interface on my 3620 with 3
mw is much faster than a 3670 with only 1 mw, even though I have the old
190 meg disks.  Even with 2 mw, the 3620 is still pretty speedy.

--David Gadbois