Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!apple!agate!shelby!morrow.stanford.edu!morrow.stanford.edu!castor From: castor@embezzle.stanford.edu (Castor Fu) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Overall speed Message-ID: Date: 13 Nov 90 19:01:52 GMT References: <7567@umd5.umd.edu> Sender: news@morrow.stanford.edu (UNIX News Service) Organization: Physics Dept., Stanford University Lines: 30 In-Reply-To: gessel@carthage.cs.swarthmore.edu's message of 13 Nov 90 18:31:58 GMT This may seem like a silly point, but all this talk about nitty gritty architectural questions gets rehashed to no end in comp.arch, and the upshot seems to always be: Run the programs YOU will be running on the machines you are interested in, and measure the speed. Any other measure (MIPS, MHz etc.) is likely to mislead you. Any single number is likely to mislead you as well, as different computers can perform better or worse on different programs. Overall performance depends on so many factors nowadays Various companies (MIPS, Sun, DEC?, IBM etc.) have formed a consortium, SPEC, to try to come up with a set of "representative" programs to make a more comprehensive set of benchmarks. The current test suite includes compilers, Monte Carlo simulations, typesetters, and so forth, i.e. CPU intensive tasks, some of which are floating point intensive as well. Performance is generally expressed in terms of multiples of the speed of a VAX 11/780. Computers like the SparcStation 1, or DECStation 3100 generally score around 10 times an 11/780. The higher end machines, (IBM RS6000, DECstation 5000, Sparcstation 2) will presumably be around 18 times an 11/780, with the IBM machine doing much better on the floating point benchmarks. So what I want to know is, have the SPEC benchmarks been run on the new NeXT machines? How do they perform? -Castor Fu castor@fizzle.stanford.edu