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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

So true. A year or two after this machine, you could have bought an AT&T StarServer "E" with 4x i486 CPUs and 2GiB total memory, for dramatically less money.

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I assume a 486 was dramatically slower than the Apollo PRISM (which looks reasonably well-designed by today's standards).

It was probably not dramatic if it was slower at all, there is a reason so many of those workstation processors died out in the 90s.

I at first thought a 486 was probably faster, but that Apollo CPU has 64 bit data path apparently. It might have been a beast. I didn't even know Apollo used anything but Motorola 68k CPUs.

I wonder if it might have been a beast at some tasks, but not others?

I imagine these chips might have been optimized for throughput on well-suited and carefully tuned programs, where the compilers could be convinced to put out good code (since it was apparently something like a VLIW).

> I wonder if it might have been a beast at some tasks, but not others?

Domain OS was a multiuser, multitasking OS running on a Motorola 68020 with 4 Megs of RAM with distributed filesystem and diskless clients which did swap over the network. Ah, and with versioning filesystem. And Spice simulations were resonably fast compared to a 386/40 running Pspice on MS-DOS.

Well, with a performance of ~22-25 MIPS, PRISM@18Mhz was about 2.5 times faster than original 25Mhz 486DX and roughly on par with 1992 486DX2 66Mhz.

2 MFLOPS for 33MHz and 4 MFLOPS for 2/66MHz 486.

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