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From: pwilcox@paldn.UUCP (Peter McLeod Wilcox)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: benchmark: 386/20 vs SparcStation 1
Summary: Floating point performance
Message-ID: <265@paldn.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jun 90 15:22:39 GMT
References: <15105@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <10893@alice.UUCP> <1990Jun7.023359.12523@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu>
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In article <1990Jun7.023359.12523@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu>, terry@eesun1.eece.ksu.edu (Terry Hull) writes:
> One of our faculty members just ran a spice circuit analysis and found the
> following:
> MIPS machine was 2x faster than our campus dual processor Solborne.  
> Solborne was 2x faster than SparcStation I
> SparcStation I was 4x faster than a cached 386/16 with a '386 installed.  

Since both the spice run and the earlier ray tracing test are heavily
dependent on floating point performance, rather than integer and general
cpu speed, it would be interesting to run the tests on 386/486 machines
with the Weitek FPU processors, in addition to the Intel FPU.

The Weitek FPUs are claimed to give a factor of 10 improvement in the
flops number.  This would make the 386/486 more than competitive with
the SS1 (if true :).

PS:  I am assuming, of course, that the ray tracer didn't use integer
math.
-- 
Pete Wilcox		...gatech!nanovx!techwood!paldn!pwilcox