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From: bchen@nntp-server.caltech.edu.UUCP (Bing-Qing Chen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXTstation's speed?
Message-ID: <1991Jan5.042935.5448@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 5 Jan 91 04:29:35 GMT
References: <1991Jan4.182011.28485@xn.ll.mit.edu>
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From article <1991Jan4.182011.28485@xn.ll.mit.edu>, by tj@xn.ll.mit.edu (Thomas E. Jones):
> 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
> ....

I ran double-precision LINPACK benchmark on both NeXTstation and Sparc 1+.
I got 1.25 Mflops on Sparc with the cc supplied, 1.31 Mflops with gcc
on Sparc and 1.53 Mflops on NeXTstation with the gcc supplied. Although
NeXTstation is quite fast in doing floating point multiply and divide, it
is very slow doing the operations not implemented in 68040 hardware like
log, exp, log, sin, cos etc. These operations generally ran 50-100% slower
than 25MHz 68882 and 2-3 times slower than Sparc 1+. I wonder if this is due
to some bugs in NeXT operation system because Motorola claimed 25MHz 68040
is supposed to do all those operations faster than 33MHz 68882.

------------
Bing Chen
NeXT mail: bchen@pooh.caltech.edu