Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!samsung!emory!mephisto!mcnc!decvax.dec.com!zinn!ubbs-nh!siia!wje
From: wje@siia.mv.com (Bill Ezell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix
Subject: Re: Rumour about IBM benchmarks
Message-ID: <1990Sep17.133400.18668@siia.mv.com>
Date: 17 Sep 90 13:34:00 GMT
References: <1233@torsqnt.UUCP>
Organization: Software Innovations, Inc.
Lines: 27

In <1233@torsqnt.UUCP> david@torsqnt.UUCP (David Haynes) writes:

>I have heard a rumour that the benchmark results that IBM posted for
>their RS6000 system were the results of hand-coded, hand-optimized...

This would seem unlikely to me. According to IBM (a perhaps suspect source)
their C compiler 'consistently produces code better than hand-coded assembler'.
This isn't too surprizing when you consider that the compiler is tailored
to generate instructions to take advantage of the pipelining inherent
in the processor, a tedious process at best when done by hand.

We've had our RS600 for about 6 months now, and our benchmarks,
which are not always compute bound, show the machine to be MUCH faster than
anything we've tested from DEC, or anyone else for that matter.

A fascinating look into the hardware and software technology of the RS6000
can be found in the January issue of IBM's equivalent of the Bell System
Technical Journal. It is truly an amazing system.

It pains me to praise IBM so highly, since I (and everyone else here) have
always been anti-IBM, sometimes rabidly so. However, when something this
good comes along, even IBM deserves credit.
-- 
Bill Ezell
Software Innovations, Inc.
wje@siia.mv.com
(603) 883-9300