Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac.hardware:8669 comp.sys.mac.system:3169 Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!rex!ames!ucsd!sdcc6!beowulf!rose From: rose@beowulf.ucsd.edu (Dan Rose) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware,comp.sys.mac.system Subject: Re: How many MIPS is the Mac? Message-ID: Date: 16 Feb 91 21:44:47 GMT References: <1991Feb16.025224.25758@cs.uoregon.edu> <1991Feb16.195110.6278@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Sender: news@sdcc6.ucsd.edu Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.hardware Lines: 28 Nntp-Posting-Host: beowulf.ucsd.edu dawg6844@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu () writes: >mkelly@cs.uoregon.edu (Michael A. Kelly) writes: >>How many MIPS is the Mac capable of? I see ads for workstations such as the >>SPARCs which say they run at 12 or 26 MIPS, and I think 'but how does that >>compare to my Mac IIcx?' >Patterson & Resnick, the founders of RISC, spend a chapter of their >latest book on hardware design explaining why MIPS and MFLOPS, the two most >common 'measures' of computer performance are basically hogwash. . . . >... >The only true way to compare these two machines is to run the same software and >compare execution times. (compile the same large program perhaps? but even that is bad, because are the compilers the same?) Even this doesn't tell the whole story. It's nearly impossible to hold everything else equal. On a system with preemptive multitasking, are you measuring the speed with all the daemons disabled? Ones that you normally need to run the system? How full is the disk? What's the scheduling algorithm? What's the size of the "working set" of the program you're timing, versus the size of the memory? On the Mac, is the RAM cache turned on? How big is it? How much is the timing code itself affecting the speed of the program being timed? Etc. This is not to say that you can't ever measure relative differences. A IIfx really is faster than an SE. Just take any numbers with a large grain of salt. -- Dan Rose drose@ucsd.edu