You're confusing hardware speed with the software/IPC measurement - the fastest VAX machine ever made ran at 100Mhz (or maybe 120), with 10Mbit ethernet and SCS

You're confusing hardware speed with the software/IPC measurement - the fastest VAX machine ever made ran at 100Mhz (or maybe 120), with 10Mbit ethernet and SCSI-2 I/O paths (1MB/s on a disk or so). If you found a 486/100 and compared raw compute speed, the vax would likely have won for most cases, because it has 4x the registers. I'm not actually sure about the clustering IPC performance, but you are essentially comparing hardware about 3-4 generations apart and blaming the software for the issues.. if you were comparing with 500MHz Alphas, etc, then you might have a point..