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From: wunder@orac.HP.COM (Walter Underwood)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: Floating-point benchmark comparison
Message-ID: <2890007@orac.HP.COM>
Date: 13 Nov 90 19:41:48 GMT
References: <1990Nov7.194853.3570@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: HP Software Engineering Systems, Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 24


   I can see why Mr. Mike McNelly is not pleased with the posting, for no
   vendor likes to see its machine near the bottom of a performance pile,
   but frankly, that is not my problem.

All of the machines at the bottom of the pile are two or more years
old, so they should be at least half the speed of current processors.
The MicroVAX II, the Sparcstation 1, the DECstation 3100, and the
9000/835 are all old machines, and each vendor has a much faster
machine on the market now.  Also, all three of those vendors have been
working hard on their compilers, so a mismatch of one or two versions
is significant.

It didn't look like Mike was complaining -- he just wanted to know
more, so he could really compare the data.  Running a set of
real-world programs on a bunch of a machines is a lot of work, and
it would be nice to have enough information about the experiment to
figure out what it means.  Without the additional information, the
reported numbers are mostly noise, with very little signal.

wunder

PS: Is the code available?  Some people might want to re-run the
benchmarks with compilers now in development.