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by unused0 1028 days ago
The VAX had byte addressable memory, the DPS8/M word 36 bit word addressable, so I suspect that byte oriented instructions might have an edge on the VAX. Contrawise, the DPS8/M memory bus width was 72 bits, so it might have had an edge in double wide operations. I suspect the dominate factor would be that the DPS8/M was core memory at 1 us access time; I don't know the memory bandwidth of the VAX but I would assume it was faster.