Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!unido!orthogo!basti
From: basti@orthogo.UUCP (Sebastian Wangnick)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 386 machines are workstations?
Message-ID: <768@orthogo.UUCP>
Date: 29 May 90 06:39:41 GMT
References: <1990May20.170544.23997@xavax.com>
Organization: none
Lines: 28

alvitar@xavax.com (Phillip Harbison) writes:
>In article <21440@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> druschel@cs.arizona.edu (Peter
>Druschel) writes:
>> In article <634@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> ian@sibyl.OZ (Ian Dall) writes:
>> > Part of *my* definition of a workstation
>> > is that it doesn't have a 80x86 as a cpu (only 1/2 :-).

When at last we got OSF/Motif for our Apollo DN3500, I ported my
application from our 386 to it as soon as possible. But alas,
when I ran the application on my X-Terminal, the 386 was faster!

Some benchmarking with the BYTE code from comp.sources.unix 
proved that indeed this 386-PC (33 MHz, 64KB RAM cache)
outperformed the Apollo workstation:

Dhrystones with registers [1/s]: 4250 5348
Arithmetic with int [s]:         12.1  3.0
Arithmetic with double [s]:        60  464
Filesystem read [KB/s]            173  327
Execl [s]:                        4.4  1.3
Sort and other Unix utilities,
   8 processes [s]:              50.3 10.5

Now, I have been praising workstations and damning PC's a long time.
But this last bench, which approximates my daily requirements best,
scattered my prejudices to pieces. 

Sebastian Wangnick (basti@orthogo.uucp)