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From: shwake@raysnec.UUCP (Ray Shwake)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Mathematica Benchmarks (NeXT vs. DEC and Mac)
Message-ID: <197@raysnec.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jan 91 16:28:52 GMT
References: <1991Jan3.214940.1@linus.claremont.edu>
Organization: IRS/CI - Technical Solutions Branch
Lines: 21

jack@linus.claremont.edu 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.  I wonder
>if it has anything to do with RISC vs CISC architectures ?(The
>NeXTstation is CISC --- The DECStation is RISC.)

	More likely, you should be looking at relative floating point
potential, reflected in the MFLOPS, rather than the MIPS figures. The
'040 has demonstrated real strengths in this area.

>The Mac IIci was surprisingly slow.  A 68030 NeXT (same CPU as the
>IIci ) is only roughly 3 times slower that the NeXTstation.  I wonder
>if the performance difference might have to compiler optimization or
>perhaps hardware (caching?)?

	I seem to recall figures suggesting the '040 has roughly 10 times
the floating point performance of the '030 with FPP. Thus your figures don't 
come as a surprise.