Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!sun-barr!newstop!sun!dogwalk.Eng.Sun.COM!herzog
From: herzog@dogwalk.Eng.Sun.COM (Brian Herzog, DSGG/DGDO/GSP/MRG/LMNOP)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: bogus benchmarks
Summary: What's wrong with this picture?
Message-ID: <140112@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 3 Aug 90 06:55:08 GMT
References: <850@earth.cs.utexas.edu> <7009@helios.TAMU.EDU> <4299@tahoe.unr.edu>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: herzog@Eng.Sun.COM (Brian Herzog)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 25

In article <4299@tahoe.unr.edu> steve@olympus.UUCP (Stephen Wheatcraft) writes:
> [...]
>I have been doing some benchmark comparisons of IBM
>R-6000, Sun 3/80, Sun 3/280 and Sillicon Graphics
>Personal Iris 4-D25TG. [...]

I think benchmarks are important, valuable, complicated, and yes, dangerous.

I don't wish to engage in benchmark wars, and even if I did, this would
be an inappropriate forum.  But I would like to point out that you've
compared one company's latest and greatest RISC architecture against
another's aging CISC architecture.  Now, if that were all the second
company had to offer, that would be one thing, but it seems to me that
to compare an R-6000 against a Sun-3 is no more meaningful than to compare
a SPARCsystem against an IBM RT (at least that would be RISC vs RISC ;-).  
What's the point?  Surely one could select configurations that would better 
approximate an apples-to-apples comparison.

Opinions expressed are my own, etc., etc.

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Herzog           "Badges?  We ain't got no badges. We don't need no
herzog@Eng.Sun.COM      badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!"
...!sun!eng!herzog                              - Treasure of the Sierra Madre