Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!ctrsol!ginosko!uunet!yale!blenko-tom From: blenko-tom@CS.YALE.EDU (Tom Blenko) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: floating-point performance Message-ID: <68105@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Date: 30 Jul 89 23:10:05 GMT References: Sender: root@yale.UUCP Reply-To: blenko-tom@CS.YALE.EDU (Tom Blenko) Distribution: usa Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept, New Haven CT 06520-2158 Lines: 35 In article mccalpin@masig1.ocean.fsu.edu (John D. McCalpin) writes: |I have been concerned about the floating-point performance of the ... |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. So are you comparing compilers with compilers? | |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 Sun+GnuCC would be more interesting. And how do disk speeds compare? |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 $$$. If you are a university making a major purchase (75 nodes or more, so I hear), you should be able to get a DECStation or a SparcStation with 8Mb, B&W, 100M local disk for under $5K (I know of three universities that have done just this). Which means you can get much better FP performance for significantly less money. Yet another reason why I say a NeXT should cost about $4K. Tom