Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!stat!stat.fsu.edu!mccalpin From: mccalpin@masig1.ocean.fsu.edu (John D. McCalpin) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: floating-point performance Message-ID: Date: 30 Jul 89 19:43:34 GMT Sender: news@stat.fsu.edu Distribution: usa Organization: Supercomputer Computations Research Institute Lines: 39 I have been concerned about the floating-point performance of the NeXT, so now that I've got one to play with, I decided to see how bad it really is. The FORTRAN results below were compiled on a Sun-3 with the -O and -f68881 options. The resulting executables were copied to the NeXT and run through 'atom (1)' to make them executable under Mach. The C results below were compiled on the NeXT with the standard (GNU) compiler. The Sun results used Sun's (ugh) compiler. LINPACK performance in kFLOPS NeXT Sun 3/260 w/68882 w/68881 w/Weitek 32-bit Fortran LINPACK : 227 130 860 64-bit Fortran LINPACK : 203 110 460 32-bit C LINPACK : 240 104 446 64-bit C LINPACK : 210 98 249 I also have a "favorite" benchmark code from one of my applications. A small excerpt of my results shows for 32-bit Fortran (except the Cray): seconds ratio to MicroVAX NeXT 158.4 1.23 Sun 3/280 (fpa) 55.3 3.53 Sun 3/280 (68881) 275.2 0.71 IRIS 3130 (fpa) 151.4 1.29 MicroVAX II 195.4 1.00 DECstation 3100 15.5 12.61 Cray X/MP 1.9 102.84 So for a cheap machine with a 68882 coprocessor, the NeXT does quite well - especially in C. Of course, if you really want to crunch, the DECstation 3100 has MUCH better floating-point performance for only a few thousand more $$$. -- John D. McCalpin - mccalpin@masig1.ocean.fsu.edu - mccalpin@nu.cs.fsu.edu mccalpin@delocn.udel.edu