Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!apple!vsi1!daver!versatc.versatec.COM!arisia!romero
From: romero@arisia.Xerox.COM (Antonio Romero)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Overall speed
Message-ID: <14164@arisia.Xerox.COM>
Date: 14 Nov 90 20:39:35 GMT
References: <7567@umd5.umd.edu>
Reply-To: romero@arisia.UUCP (Antonio Romero)
Organization: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Lines: 21

In article <7567@umd5.umd.edu> matthews@is-next.umd.edu (Mike Matthews) writes:
>The SPARC 2 is a RISC machine, right?  So it's 28 MIPS is fast, but each
>instruction isn't doing all that much.
>But the NeXT's 15 MIPS is CISC architecture, so each instruction does a full
>command, so to speak.  Assuming a CISC instruction is approximately equal to
>three or so (on average) RISC instructions... ?
>Am I missing something?


Yes, you are.

These days benchmarks are usually "normalized" so that the amount of
real work accomplished by a 1 MIP machine is equivalent to the amount
of "real work" accomplished by a VAX 11/780.  While benchmark ratings
can of course be rigged by recoding the tests, there is *some* consistency
because of this kind of normalization.

So, the claim is that a NeXT is 15x the speed of a 780, and the 
Sparcstation 2 (Sparcstation ][? ;) ) is about 28x.

-Antonio Romero       romero@arisia.xerox.com