Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Let's pretend
Keywords: Intel, 586, windows
Message-ID: <3080@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 20 Dec 90 14:04:10 GMT
References: <3058@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Dec19.052338.3911@kithrup.COM> <1990Dec19.143749.3216@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1990Dec19.222932.1446@kithrup.COM>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 18

In article <1990Dec19.222932.1446@kithrup.COM> sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes:

| The instruction set was designed to be efficient in a different era.  Now,
| it's not so efficient.  Why do you think that RISC chips, or even 68k's, are
| getting such higher performance?

  Take a look at SPECmarks and rething that last one. The 25 MHz 486
falls between the SS1 and SS+, 33MHz is off the shelf, 40MHz is
scheduled in a few months and engineering samples were out for board
design, average cycles per instruction is something like 1.3, fairly
close to the actual performance of most RISC machine.

  My point is that the term "such higher performance" is misleading, the
486 is comparable in performance to the typical single user workstation
RISC CPU (not many people get a 4/490 for personal use).
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
    VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix.