[Simh] performance of the emulated VAX on different hosts

[A.Bucher at alcatel.de]

Hi,

since I did not read the whole archive I am not sure if this was mentioned
or asked before:

Is there any comparison in performance for simh emulated VAXes to real ones
?

Like, in my case, running simh on an old PIII-500Mhz, it feels like an
uVAX3900.Running it on a 1.3Ghz Laptop feels a little bit faster, but not
really
(but finally one of my dreams came true - a Laptop VAX !! I always blamed
DEC not having developed that ! (no, the VS2000 is not _really_ portable
<g>)

 Are there any benchmarks for this ?
What is better, simh on Wintel, simh on InTux ? Or another host hardware ?
 What kind of PC is required to have a similar performance of a "real" VAX
?
How does a multi-cpu host affect the performance of simh ?
What's about IO bandwith (okay, lousy on a PC compared to a VAX, no ?) and
network performance ? can the emulator handle 100MBit (or more) ?

Like for replacing one of the latest 4000 serve clusters, what PC (or other
systems) would be adviseable ?
Did anybody here think about such cases ? Is simh reliable enough ?

So, what would be the best hardware for building a really "strong" virtual
VAX ?

Currently just thoughts, anyway ... and sorry for talking about PCs so
much, but they are the cheapest platform right now ...

regards,
Andreas Bucher

PS: I am thinking to give the IBM guys the rattling shake and have a
zSeries executing VMS !  Linux  running SIMH installed with VMS should do !
To the heck with the performance, but I want to see the VMS $ prompt on an
IBM terminal :-)
Just think about telling this to some computer expert in the early eighties
...