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From: bostrov@storm.UUCP (Vareck Bostrom)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXTStation Benchmark
Message-ID: <644@storm.UUCP>
Date: 16 Nov 90 16:33:53 GMT
References: <738@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>
Reply-To: bostrov@storm.UUCP (Vareck Bostrom)
Distribution: na
Organization: storm UUCP, Eugene, Oregon, United States
Lines: 41

In article <738@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU> barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes:
>DecStation 3100:
>
>        0.5u 0.0s 0:00 100% 41+31k 0+0io 0pf+0w 
>
>        => 2.0 MFLOPS
>
>SparcStation 1
>
>        0.430u 0.080s 0:00.65 78% 0+215k 2+0io 2pf+0w
>
>        => 2.3 MFLOPS

Something seems wrong here, we're talking about the SPARCstation 1,
20 MHz SPARC, Weitek 3170 FPU? That seems a bit fast for one, and I am
truly surprised that it beat the DECstation 3100. Doing a lot of raytracing,
which heavily uses Floating point, the DECstation 3100 ALWAYS beat 
SPARCstation 1's and 1+'s that I ran it on. An ardent titan-3 I ran it
on so far has teh best performance, topping 20 MFLOPS easily (judging by
the speed increase over an HP 9000/845, about 4.0 MFLOPS). 

I am a little surprised at the NeXT's results, which also seem a tad high,
but only because NeXT says 2.8 MFLOPS and my test (DP Linpack) ran at about
3.0 MFLOPS. 3.0 MFLOPS is certanily not slow for a workstation or home
machine. 

The NeXT-040 beat a SPARCserver 4/330, all the sun-3's, 4/60, 4/65, 
Decstation-2100, Decstation-3100 (close on this one, but the NeXT won).
It did not beat a Decstation-5000 and an HP 9000/845 as well as an
Ardent with vector fpu and a 8 processor Cray XMP (no suprise here, eh?) 

I am wondering why there isn't an i860 FPU on the NeXT motherboard, I mean
after all, we'd be looking at 60-80 MFLOPS from an FPU like that, I imagine
that real world performance isn't better than 30-50 MFlops, but that's still
much better than the MC68040's 3.0 or so. This is interesting, the NeXT
video option (NeXT dimention) offers superior performance in fp than
the motherboard itself, by far. 

oh well.

- Vareck