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From: dhoyman@vms.macc.wisc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: How many MIPS is a Mac?
Message-ID: <1991Feb18.160733.20724@macc.wisc.edu>
Date: 18 Feb 91 15:17:39 GMT
Sender: news@macc.wisc.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: University of Wisconsin Academic Computing Center
Lines: 53

An earlier posting asked for the MIPS rating of a Mac and later postings
have discussed the appropriateness of MIPS and FLOPS (unfortunately I have
lost those, so I cannot post a followup).  

While I would agree that one cannot compare MIPS directly, the Dhystone
benchmark is often used as a measure of MIPS with the conversion factor
of 1750 Dhrystone/s = 1 MIPS.  However, Dhrystone is actually measuring 
the number of passes thru a loop, not actual MIPS.  Thus, one can compare
Dhrystones/s on different machines.  This is in a sense a measure of raw
horsepower, integer performance.  Along with integer performance, Dhrystone 
is also compiler and OS dependant, although it was constructed so as to 
minimize this variability.  For a complete discussion of the Dhrystone see
The Communications of the ACM	Vol 27, No 10, 10/84 pg. 1013.

With this in mind, allow me to post some Dhyrstone timings I have obtained
on various machines.  I used the Dhystone 1.1 written in C.  On the Mac I 
built a single version with Think C.  On Dos I used Turbo C.  On the Unix/Vms
systems I used the vendor's C.

Computer	O/S	Dhrystones/sec
		

Cray Y-MP	UNICOS	16000
Zentith 386 33Mz	MS-DOS	8333
Gateway 386 33Mz	MS-DOS	8333
VAX 6420	VMS	7149
Mac IIci	Macintosh	7145
Sequent	Unix	3699
Mac IIcx	Macintosh	3500
VAX 3200	VMS	2941
Mac II	Macintosh	2777
AT&T 6386	MS-DOS	2631
AT&T 3B2 600	Unix System V	1785
MicroVAX II	Ultrix	1077
Mac SE	Macintosh	877
VAXstation II	VMS	862
Mac Plus	Macintosh	735
Zenith 8086 10Mz	MS-DOS	476

Sorry for the poor formatting, I had this on an Excel spreadsheet.  I have
run this on a Sun SparcStation, but I think the number is way too low.  I
would also draw your attention to the Cray number.  Remember that this is
for INTEGER performance.  If we would run the Whetstone or some other 
floating point benchmark, the Cray would show a BIG advantage.

Actually, I only take this with a grain of salt.  The only comparisons
that I really believe are application oriented.  See MacWorld March 1991 for
a good comparison of Macs and PC's application speed.

Dirk Herr-Hoyman
UW-Madison, Dept. of Family Medicine and Practice
dhoyman@fammed.wisc.edu
608-262-6368