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From: barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXTStation Benchmarks
Message-ID: <750@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 16 Nov 90 01:17:50 GMT
Sender: news@MATH.UCLA.EDU
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Organization: UCLA Dept. of Math, UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
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Further search for the truth: Here's some hotter numbers
on my trivial Million Multiply benchmark
from Sun (Thanks to Larry Wake):

Sun 3/50 with MC68881 coprocessor (compiled with cc -O -f68881)

    0.24 MFLOPS    (Yes, its true,  every 3/50 I've ever used
                    has had a 68881 chip on it.)

SPARCstation 1+  (not a current product, but similar to SLC)

    3.2 MFLOPS

And, here's a special guest appearance by...The SPARC 2!

SPARCstation 2  ( using ``cc -O'', and SunOS 4.1.1)

    10. MFLOPS

(note: the timing line for this read
0.1u 0.0s 0:00 122% 0+124k 0+0io 0pf+0w---how does it run at 122% ?)

Recall the other top stats:

NeXTSTation:         3.3 MFLOPS
RS/6000:             3.7 MFLOPS
DECStation 3100:     4.0 MFLOPS

-----------------------------

As others have pointed out, SPECmarks are probably 
superior to my benchmark. On the other hand, I didn't
have time to type the SPECmark code in at the demo NeXT :-).
And, I do consider my little code to be the purest measurement
of ``1 MFLOP'', except for complications from the shell, the OS
version, the compiler version, caches, etc---after all, 
if a machine can't do well on that, its not likely to do 
better on more complex floating point codes.

--
Barry Merriman
UCLA Dept. of Math
UCLA Inst. for Fusion and Plasma Research
barry@math.ucla.edu (Internet)