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- Path: sparky!uunet!nih-csl!yog-sothoth.dcrt.nih.gov!jwa
- From: jwa@yog-sothoth.dcrt.nih.gov (James W. Adams)
- Subject: Re: DOS on a SPARC
- Message-ID: <1992Aug27.143452.2273@alw.nih.gov>
- Sender: postman@alw.nih.gov (AMDS Postmaster)
- Organization: National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
- References: <1992Aug24.192938.18358@kodak.kodak.com> <1992Aug26.001954.28700@alw.nih.gov> <1263@eplunix.UUCP>
- Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 14:34:52 GMT
- Lines: 32
-
- In article <1263@eplunix.UUCP> raoul@eplunix.UUCP (Nico Garcia) writes:
- >In article <1992Aug26.001954.28700@alw.nih.gov>, jwa@yog-sothoth.dcrt.nih.gov (James W. Adams) writes:
- >> You don't want to run a compute-intensive process like SPICE under
- >> a PC emulator. It is far too slow.
- >
- >Ummm, there are lots of cheap and useful freebies, demos, and utilities on
- >DOS that just aren't available or cost mucho dinero on a Sparc, such as PADS
- >utilities, Pspice, Abel.
- >
- >It can make more sense to buy an emulation program like SoftPC or SunPC
- >(SunPC is available from Sun Express) and test or occasionally use packages
- >like these, rather than buy a PC and take up limited desk space or spend the
- >bucks for a big color PC monitor when you have a 19" color Sony on your
- >SparcII. [...] (edited for brevity)
-
- Good points, but the tone of the original post suggested that the poster
- wanted to do serious work with a circuit analysis package on the SPARC,
- not just try a package or run an occasional small job. Since SPICE is
- available for the SPARC at relatively little cost, I recommended that
- alternative.
-
- My experience with PC emulators on the SPARC has been that they are too
- slow and unresponsive to use computationally or graphically intensive
- software effectively unless hardware acceleration is present. Using a
- 80x86 coprocessor board gives acceptable speed, but interoperability is
- far from seamless. Hence I stand by my statement above.
-
- --
- James W. Adams -- NIH Scientific Computing Resource Center
- Building 12A, Room 1050 phone: (301) 402-3488
- National Institutes of Health uucp: uunet!nih-csl!jwa
- Bethesda, MD 20892 Internet: jwa@alw.nih.gov
-