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From: gsk@khaki.asd.sgi.com (George S. Kong)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac
Subject: mac se/30 vs. 386/387 fortran floating point performance
Message-ID: <62010@sgi.sgi.com>
Date: 10 Jun 90 10:22:55 GMT
Sender: news@sgi.sgi.com
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 31

can anyone out there help me compare a mac to a 386 clone
w.r.t. floating point performance in fortran?

i have a friend who's a grad student in physics and would
like to buy a machine to run simulations written in fortran.

because of the student discounts available to him, he can
purchase a mac se/30 or a similarly-configured 33 Mhz 386
clone with a 387 math coprocessor for roughly the same price.

i have two sets of questions:

1) what fortran compilers are available for these two machines
   at fairly low cost?

   how do they perform on the above-mentioned hardware?

2) the 33MHz 386 machine is closest to the se/30 in price,
   but slower ones are available. some of these models are
   available with and without caches. does presence or absence
   of a cache affect math coprocessor performance the same way
   it affects performance of other cpu operations?

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thanks.

George S. Kong,  Silicon Graphics, Inc.,  (415)962-3281
gsk@sgi.com
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