[rescue] emulation fun

[Peter Corlett]

On 2 Feb 2009, at 16:05, Dennis Boone wrote:
[...]
> I seem to recall 3 megabytes per second per channel.  Seems like we  
> had
> 32 channels.  Computationally, the /200J (or was it the /180? memory
> fades...) was about equivalent to an 80486.  For VM/CMS, the block  
> size
> was commonly 4k.
>
> The impressive thing was not so much the bandwidth of one channel, as
> the fact that the machine could supposedly sustain full rate across  
> all
> channels simultaneously.  Consider the main memory bandwidth needed to
> achieve that while also running all the applications.

The Sun Fire X5400 "Thumper" is basically a PC with 48 SATA channels  
and four GigE network ports. Sun claim it can shuttle data between  
disk and network at 1GB/s, that is, all four ports running flat-out  
bidirectionally.

PCs are no longer the cruddy old things with slow ISA busses that  
we've all mocked for decades.