Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!pphillip From: pphillip@cs.ubc.ca (Peter Phillips) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NeXTStation Benchmark Message-ID: <10501@ubc-cs.UUCP> Date: 18 Nov 90 12:05:48 GMT References: <738@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU> Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca Distribution: na Organization: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Lines: 46 In article <738@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU> barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes: [ saw a NeXTStation, tried a simple benchmark ] >The results are (drumroll...) [ other results omitted ] >NeXTStation > > 0.3u 0.0s 0:00 92% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w ^^^^ 1 digit > > => 3.3 MFLOPS Hmmm, 1/0.3 = 3.3333, but does "time" round up or down or neither? This time could be as good as 5.0 MFLOPS or as poor as 2.5 MFLOPS (just about as bad as a Sparcstation 1 at 2.3). Did "time" always give the same measured speed or did you only run the "benchmark" once? Given similar qualities of measure I was able to experimentally verify that a plastic grocery bag gave me a much better overall levitation/price that Kurt Vonnetgut's recent book, "Hocus Pocus". Oddly enough, the plastic bag was actually slower to hit the ground but cost less than hardcover book. This might be due to the extra overhead involved with the book; the dust jacket seemed reasonally competitive by itself. Seriously, benchmarking a system is a tricky business. Perhaps a real program would have been more appropriate. (Remember to bring that OD or MSDOS disk with your favourite program on it NeXT time you're invited to see a nextstation). Or maybe NeXT will actually release a full SPEC performance sheet for their systems? On the other hand, does it really matter how fast a NeXTStation runs? I'm sure it is faster than the original cube and if you want to do things which are specific to the NeXT machine you really don't have any other choices, do you? Personally, I think that as long as NeXT sticks to the 680?0 line the cube's descendants will always be slower than their competitor's models. -- Peter Phillips | Just because some of us can read and write | and do a little math, that doesn't mean we {alberta,uunet}!ubc-cs!pphillip | deserve to conquer the Universe. - E.D.Hartke