Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!percy!nerd
From: nerd@percy.rain.com (Michael Galassi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Benchmarks
Message-ID: <1991Jan5.022126.19747@percy.rain.com>
Date: 5 Jan 91 02:21:26 GMT
References: <10016@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: Percy's UNIX, Portland, OR.
Lines: 25

In article <10016@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> jclee@cory.Berkeley.EDU (James C. Lee) writes:

>> The NeXTStation was about 20-30% faster on this group of benchmarks
>> than the DECStation 3100.  This is surprising since the DECStation is
>> rated and 13.9 Mips and the NeXTstation benches at 15.0 Mips.  You
>> would expect from the Mips rating only about a 10% increase.

>or maybe it's because the 15.0 MIPS is a conservative estimate. I know
>that some manufacturers using 68040 have rated their computers at
>17.0 MIPS or higher....

MIPS = Milions of Instructions Per Second.  An 040 does more in each
average instruction than the MIPS R[23]000 (in the DECstations) thus
1 Motorola MIPS yeilds more preformace than 1 R[23]000 MIPS all else
being equal.  It folows that no usefull information can be gotten by
comparing MIPS figures for processors of different families.

Since most of us have no real interest in how many instructions the
cpu executes but rather are concerned with how long our computer takes
to complete a task why don't we compare something more relevant.  I
would suggest the SPEC benchmarks if they have been run on the NeXT
or some other equaly general set.
-- 
Michael Galassi				| nerd@percy.rain.com
MS-DOS:  The ultimate PC virus.		| ...!tektronix!percy!nerd