[rescue] Sun 3/60

[Dave McGuire]

On August 16, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> >   And there's one way NO PC will ever run rings around a Sun3/60:
> > Reliability.  Some of those machines regularly had uptimes near 600
> > days.  And they were in constant use.
> 
> Hah!  Piddlywinks!  If I'd have had a UPS and some air conditioning in
> my office back then I'm sure I could have made it to 900 days with no
> sweat.

  Indeed.

> As it was my 3/60 apparently bit the bucket after its third summer in my
> +90-degree office....  :-(  [I've not really tried to do anything with
> it to see what's burned out -- it's still sitting out in my garage.]

  :-(

> >   And I don't know anyone who's actually used the SunOS4 C compiler to
> > do anything but bootstrap GCC.  Especially on a 68K, where GCC's
> > optimizer kicks ass.
> 
> Ah, no, that's not true at all.  I *ONLY* used Sun's m68k compiler and
> *never* used GCC for production code, and for very well researched and
> justified reasons too.  (and I built several small ISPs with all the
> bells and whistles on purely sun-3 equipment!)
> 
> SunOS-4's compiler always generated smaller code, and usually faster
> code too, not to mention being much faster at generating that code....
> (GCC's bloat could cause even the most well endowed sun3 to swap in some
> circumstances!)  I don't think I ever ran into any compiler bugs with
> SunOS-4's m68k compiler either, but I can't say the same about GCC.

  Then why is it that X on an M68k built with gcc (circa early gcc 2.x
days) runs easily 2-3 times faster when built with GCC as compared
with Sun's cc?  Not to be argumentative, but...

> (of course where GCC really started to loose ground is on sparc v8 and
> alpha -- only with GCC-3.x is performance supposedly coming back up to
> par with commercial compilers.  It really sucked on the 3B2 too, at
> least after the SysVr3.2 compiler came out with its enhanced optimiser.)

  Agreed.

    -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Laurel, MD