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From: fellman@celece.ucsd.edu (Ronald Fellman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips,comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Workstation speed comparisons
Keywords: price, performance, MIPS
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Date: 17 Oct 89 05:25:17 GMT
References: <12850@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
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The comparisons are VERY misleading since they didn't take into
consideration number crunching or graphics applications.

For example, I took the sin of a number on a Data General 88K (at
20MHz), DecStation3100, and a Sun 4/280. The DecStation was about twice
the speed of either the Sun or DG machines.  Many simulation programs,
such as Spice, spend nearly all of their time doing double-precision
floating-point computations. Thus you can probably double the
price/performance ratio of the Decstation for those applications.  For
graphice applications,
the SparcStation can be purchased with an inexpensive graphics
accelerator board. This cant be done with either the Dec or DG machine.
For graphics applications, the SparcStation might be best.

-ron