SUNFLASH ! ---------- Sunflash is an electronic mail news service from Sun Microsystems, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Please address comments to John McLaughlin (sun!sunvice!johnj or johnmclaughlin@sun.COM). (305) 776-7770. Sunflash is targeted at Sun customers and users, not Sun employees as much of the information posted to sunflash is already available to Sun employees. If you have any information that you think would be of value to Sun users and customers, please email it to sun!sunvice!johnj. -johnj ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ DOS Windows 1.0 IS NOW AVAILABLE. DOS Windows 1.0 for SPARCstations, Sun-4's and Sun-3's began shipping to customers on Wednesday July 19th, 1989. A DOS Windows Product Family Brochure describing and differentiating the features of DOS windows 1.0 for SPARCstation, Sun-4 and Sun-3, the SunIPC 1.2, and Sun386i DOS Windows are available through Sun Sales offices. For further information or questions please contact you Sun sales representative. ======================================================================== 1. PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKS The following benchmarks are designed to provide you a basis for comparing the three DOS Windows products: Sun386i DOS Windows, the SunIPC 1.2 and SPARCstation, Sun-4 and Sun3 DOS Windows 1.0. The three application benchmarks were chosen because they represent overall performance as perceived when the product is being used. The CPU, Disk I/O, and Screen Output benchmarks show the relative strengths and weaknesses of each of the products. We have included the Compaq 386 at 25 Mhz to provide you a point of comparison for Sun's products versus high-end PCs. The benchmarks were run in a controlled lab environment. The performance numbers were normalized to show performance of each of the products relative to the performance of an IBM PC/XT. For example, for the Lotus benchmark, the SPARCstation 1 is about 1.47 times the speed of an IBM PC/XT, and Sun 386i DOS Windows is 9.55 times an XT. DOS Performance Studies 29 June 1989 SS1 SunIPC Sun386i IBM IBM Compaq DOS Windows 1.2 DOS Windows PC/XT PC/AT 386/25 1.0 Lotus Bench13 1.47 6.00 9.55 1.00 4.12 11.67 Dbase 3 1.79 4.09 2.57 1.00 4.52 13.10 MS word 1.16 5.56 4.17 1.00 3.13 6.25 CPU (pclab 12) 1.96 5.45 11.31 1.00 3.68 13.32 OUTPUT (pclab 44) 2.24 8.70 5.14 1.00 2.01 22.09 NET (pclab 21) 5.06 11.81 6.53 1.00 1.49 1.78 DISK (pclab 21) 7.16 11.02 20.83 1.00 2.11 5.60 ========================================================================= 2. ORDERING INFORMATION Please contact you Sun sales office for ordering information. The following information is probably correct. USE THE FOLLOWING ORDERING AND CONFIGURATION INFORMATION TO ORDER DOS Windows 1.0: Media / Documents / RTU: ORDER NUMBERS 1/2" Tape 1/4" Tape 3.5" Floppy DISCOUNT QTY / Price 1- 4 / $495 DW1-1.0-4-34-6 DW1-1.0-4-34-5 DW1-1.0-4-34-13 B 5-24 / $420 DW2-1.0-4-34-6 DW2-1.0-4-34-5 DW2-1.0-4-34-13 ND 25-49 / $357 DW3-1.0-4-34-6 DW3-1.0-4-34-5 DW3-1.0-4-34-13 ND 50-99 / $303 DW4-1.0-4-34-6 DW4-1.0-4-34-5 DW4-1.0-4-34-13 ND 100+ / $258 DW5-1.0-4-34-6 DW5-1.0-4-34-5 DW5-1.0-4-34-13 ND Documents Only: QTY / Price DISCOUNT 1-24 / $170 DW1-1.0-X-X-9 B 25+ / $100 DW2-1.0-X-X-9 ND RTU Only: QTY / Price DISCOUNT 1- 4 / $195 DW1-X-X-X-0 B 5-24 / $165 DW2-X-X-X-0 ND 25-49 / $140 DW3-X-X-X-0 ND 50-99 / $120 DW4-X-X-X-0 ND 100+ / $100 DW5-X-X-X-0 ND Notes: 1. DOS Windows 1.0 is hostid dependent. Customers must obtain a password prior to installing the application. In the U.S. the customer must call 1(800) USA-4SUN with their hostid in order to obtain a password. Outside the US please refer to the DOS Windows 1.0 Read This First for the appropriate answer center contact. 2. Volume prices are non-discountable. If volume prices are not applicable, standard category B discounts apply. Use quantity 1-4 pricing less the category B discount. 3. If you have already submitted an order using the information in the price list, it will be linked to the correct product number at order entry. To guarantee your order is processed correctly please do not use the price list for any future orders. ORDERING EXAMPLES: Situation 1: The customer wants five copies of DOS Windows 1.0. However, they do not wish to order five fully configured packages with media, documents and RTU. They want to copy the documents themselves and only need one copy of the media. Order Solution 1: They must order at least one copy of the fully configured package at $495, and then 4 RTU Only options at $195. In this case it is wise to encourage the customer to purchase one additional RTU to get the additional price break, (the incremental cost for the fifth RTU is only $70). Situation 2: The customer ordered 20 copies of DOS Windows 1.0 four months ago, and they need one more copy. A new order needs to be written, as the other is closed and paid for. Order Solution 2: The price of the additional copy of Media/Documents/RTU would be $495,less the standard B discount. In this case it would be wise to offer the customer the RTU only option at $195. But remember, the order is considered to be a quantity of one. Volume pricing is available on a per order basis only. ================================================================== 3. COMMONLY ASKED QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS FLOPPIES: Q: Is there a floppy drive solution available for Sun's platforms which don't have a built in floppy option? A: Yes, Scientific Micro Systems (SMS) will be providing a shoebox containing both a 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disk drives. The floppy driver will be made available from Sun Consulting. The option has not yet been priced. For questions please contact Jeff Siegel. Q: Can you read DOS formatted disks from the floppy drive in the SPARCstation or Sun-3/80 without DOS Windows 1.0? A: No, DOS Windows 1.0 is required in order to be able to read DOS formatted 3.5" diskettes on the SPARCstation 1 and Sun 3/80. Both systems can read regular UNIX formatted diskettes and utilize the drive as if it were a UNIX drive. However, if you wish to use the drive for DOS applications, you must be running DOS Windows 1.0. Q: Can the 3.5" floppy drive on Sparcstation 1 or Sun-3/80 be accessed remotely from another workstation running DOS Windows 1.0? How about the 5.25" floppy with the SunIPC 1.2, can it be accessed remotely? A: DOS Windows 1.0 cannot access a drive that is not directly connected to the workstation. SunIPC 1.2 can only access the floppy drive to which it is directly connected. However, the user can run the SunIPC 1.2 remotely from anywhere on the network, which means the user can access the floppy from a remote workstation. Q: Can you run multiple sessions of DOS Windows 1.0.? How does it affect performance? A: While the average DOS Windows user would run only a single session at a time, DOS Windows 1.0 will run as many multiple session as you want, limited only by the system resources available and the configuration of the workstation (especially swap space). Each window competes to use the CPU, which means that if you need to use multiple DOS Windows it is best to pause non-active sessions. This can be done by either choosing the pause option from the system menu, or by closing the window down to an icon. Q: Do you get better performance from DOS Windows 1.0 if you run it with the GX? A: Yes, but only because of general SunView speedups. The net performance effect is negligible. Q: How big is DOS Windows 1.0? A: The entire distribution is about 3.4 meg. The program takes about 7 to 8 meg of swap space per DOS Window to run. It's working set is about 2 meg. Q: Will the new DOS Window 1.0 product support DOS packages that utilize 286 protected mode. A: None of the DOS Windows products support applications that use the 80286 protected mode, DOS Windows 1.0 included. Q: Will DOS Windows 1.0 on SPARCstation 1 replace the Sun-386i? A: No, DOS Windows on the Sun-386i is still the top of the line for Sun's DOS Windows products. Features which differentiate the Sun-386i are: IBM PC/AT to 80386 class performance, an AT Bus with the ability to connect to PC Lan's, multiple and simultaneous DOS Windows with the standard configuration, a full screen MS Windows driver which allows resizing the window when you start the application, VGA/EGA Graphics option, 9600 Baud Communications, 32 MB of virtual LIM per DOS Window, a hardware parallel port. Q: Why is a SPARCstation 1 three times faster than a 3/80, but when running DOS Windows the SPARCstation 1 is only 30% faster? A: There are four major areas of processing that go on in DOS Windows. They are (roughly ranked by % of processing time): 1. Integer Instruction Execution (emulating an 80286) 2. Video Emulation 3. IBM/PC H/W emulation (disk, serial, timer, etc) 4. Floating Point Execution (emulating an 80287) Normally the majority of execution time is taken up by integer instruction and video emulation. Applications that are floating point intensive (such as Autocad and Lotus-123) are also limited by the speed of the floating point emulation. The basic functionality of DOS Windows is to translate application instructions from a virtual IBM/PC-AT into the actual resources available on the Sun platform. The speed of this translation will be governed by two things: The architectural "distance" -- how much "work" must be done to translate operations from the PC model into the Sun services available. The resources available (the raw CPU MIPs, any video acceleration available, etc). So, back to the original question: why does the speed of DOS Windows not scale directly with MIPs** between 680X0 and SPARC machines? There's a balance between things that work better on SPARC and things that work worse: On the "good" side, the video and PC H/W emulations run much faster on a SPARCstation 1. The speed of these operations do indeed seem to scale roughly equivalently with MIPs. However, the "bad" side has much more weighing against the performance of the product on SPARC machines: The most serious problem is that the "architectural distance" between the 80286 instruction set and the SPARC instruction set is much greater than that of the 680X0. Thus, a given sequence of 80286 instructions translate into many more SPARC instructions than 680X0 instructions. Another significant problem with SPARC machines is the hit rate of the cache. The DOS Windows application has a particularly low level of locality of reference. This means that machines that depend on their caches to achieve a high instruction execution rate will not live up to their performance claims when running DOS Windows. Instead, they end up being limited by their memory latencies, and the memory latency of the SPARCstation 1 is longer than the 3/80. This means that instead of comparing a 12 MIPs vs. 3 MIPs machine, we are comparing a 600 ns SPARCstation 1 load cycle (to get the entire four words from memory) to a 250 ns 3/80 load cycle (with an addition 300 ns to get the other three words from memory). Therefore the SPARCstation 1 has gone from having a raw speed advantage of 400% to a raw speed disadvantage of 240% when there is a cache miss. The actual speed will vary to something in between these figures. Finally, SPARC machines do not support 80 bit floating point -- they only support 64 bits. The 80287 chip which we are emulating requires 80 bits of precision. The 68881/68882 chip DOES provide 80 bit floating point. Therefore DOS Windows floating point runs *much* faster on 680X0 machines; in fact, the 3/80 with its 68882 is one of the fastest platforms we have tested for running Autocad. Finally, we want to make sure that everyone realizes that on average DOS Windows *IS FASTER* on a SPARCstation 1 than it is on a 3/80; it's just not as much faster as one would expect from comparing raw MIPs.