Denys Beauchman writes:
>The Intel 440LX based AGP systems are very fast, and Windows NT 4.0 is
>quite ready for prime-time in the workstation arena. It is no wonder the
>UNIX workstation sales have shrunk 10% each of the last 2 years. NT on
>Pentium II is eating their lunch. SUN is fighting back with a small
>system in a lower price range, in a valiant effort to stem the UNIX
>workstation hemorrhage.
Unsurprisingly, this comment misses some important information about
non-Microsoft products. One of the big problems with NT is its poor
performance. NT may be almost ready for graphics workstation use, and
Wintel hardware manufacturers are putting enormous efforts into marketing
into this arena, but NT's severe performance problems have and will
continue to limit its use in large-scale rendering applications. Using NT
can cost up to 50% in elapsed time for noninteractive tasks compared to
Unix running on the same processor.
There's also an obvious logical inconsistency in the poster's statement:
the Pentium II has been out for less than a year, and AGP systems for
less than that. It's a logical impossibility for this technology to have
eaten anyone's lunch before it existed, but when someone is engaged in
following a leader simply because they are the leader, logic is an
ineffective countermeasure -- as HP 3000 users know to their cost.
I have first-hand experience with NT's poor performance, and this is in
network processing, where one might reasonably expect NT to excel. One of
the PC-based development projects I'm working on requires that I keep the
source and object code on a separate server. A full 16-bit build of this
project, about 1.5MB of source code, takes just under eight minutes under
WinNT. I had planned an expensive upgrade for our network, switching most
of our computers over to 100BaseT, thinking that was the problem.
Fortunately, just before I started the upgrade, I had occasion to boot
the development system under Win3.1 and perform the same task. The
surprising result: 3-1/2 minutes to complete the same build, from the
same server, on the same hardware. Simply switching to NT from Win3.1
costs over 60% in performance in this admittedly rather specialized task.
So I can't do anything about the performance, but at least I saved myself
an expensive and troublesome network upgrade that would have had little
or no benefit. And I learned something about NT: that the benchmarks that
keep placing it at the bottom of the performance heap do have something
to do with the real world. (At least insofar as my little shop represents
the real world.)
-- Bruce
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