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From: mash@mips.com (John Mashey)
Newsgroups: comp.benchmarks
Subject: Re: Price/Performance figures for Number-Crunching
Message-ID: <1789@spim.mips.COM>
Date: 3 Apr 91 03:47:34 GMT
References: <1991Mar23.192405.7668@aeras.uucp> <1628@spim.mips.COM> <17933@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
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In article <17933@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> jclark@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (John Clark) writes:
>In article <1628@spim.mips.COM> mash@mips.com (John Mashey) writes:
>+SPEC has ALWAYS believed that there is no one figure of merit.
>+That's why SPEC has always used a reporting form that included all 10 numbers,
>+and why we've always said you need to see all of the numbers to even
>+get a clue what the machine is like.  It turns out that the SPECint

>I just got the SPEC info from Franson, Hagerty, and Associates, Inc.
>and it appears to me that one must have un*x running on one's CPU to
>perform most if not all the 10 benchmarks. How have others done
>benchmarks on machines which run say, vxWorks or other 'real time'
>OS's?
Actually, the benchmarks have been run under VAX/VMS (mostly),
and on various i860 attached-processor boards (albeit attached to UNIX).
However, I don't think that helps you in any case.

>(Note: yes we do have a version of BSD on our hardware but we
>didn't port FORTRAN, so 6 of the 10 are unavailable to us.)
>
>And yes we could get the 'sun3' FORTRAN and then run the result
>under vxWorks until I/O or virtual memory requirements caused
>problems.

Let's take the 3 problems in order:
	a) Single-task integer compute speed.  For the case you describe,
	it is probably not too bad to convert 3 of the 4 C programs,
	and put that profile versus other things.  (I wouldn't attempt
	teh 001.gcc benchmark).  Thus, you wouldat least get a couple
	data points that you could compare on, and most of these will
	run OK in an 8MB machine.
	b) FP: is FP important to you?
		No.  Done with this part.
		Yes. painful, with no FORTRAN compiler.
			also, we didn't manage to find a C floating-point
			program we liked the first round, so there's nothing
			there for you.
	c) Real-time response: people have been wishing for a while that
	there was a real-time and/or embedded-control benchmark suite that
	lots of people agreed on....  good luck.
-- 
-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
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