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From: tj@xn.ll.mit.edu (Thomas E. Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: NeXTstation's speed?
Message-ID: <1991Jan4.182011.28485@xn.ll.mit.edu>
Date: 4 Jan 91 18:20:11 GMT
Organization: MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Lines: 24

I and a friend were wondering about this new NeXTstation.  The sales brocures
look great.  They say it's capable of processing at 15 MIPS and 2 MFLOPS.
That sounds like it should be a peak speed (salespeople talking there.)

Has anyone done any real benchmarking?  How does this compare to a sparkstation
or a Sun 3?  MIT people can get an 8 MEG NeXTstation with 105MB and software
for $3450.  This isn't terribly different than what we can get for a 
sparkstation, which is is said to have 15.8 Dhrystone MIPS, and 1.7 MFLOPS
double-precision LINPACK.  I get the idea Sun is leveling with us, not
just telling us maximum theoretical speed we can never acheive, but the
real Benchmarks (they also say 10.0 SPECmarks, which I've never heard of.)

If anyone has really used a Sun3 or a Sparkstation, I'd really like to
hear from you.  I figure the people who shelled out big money for a NeXT
station wouldn't want to admit it's slow, so someone who has alternated
between the NeXT and a RISC machine of some sort would be more unbiased.

			- Thomas E. Jones
			 tj@xn.ll.mit.edu


-- 
tj@xn.ll.mit.edu or tj@ll-xn.arpa          (one of these should work)
Thomas E. Jones, home (617) 924-8326 work (617) 981-5093