Newsgroups: comp.arch Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!blacks!dank From: dank@blacks.jpl.nasa.gov (Dan Kegel) Subject: Re: Anything wrong with the i860 Message-ID: Sender: news@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov (Usenet) Nntp-Posting-Host: blacks.jpl.nasa.gov Organization: Image Analysis Systems Group, JPL References: <1991May7.145407.18417@midway.uchicago.edu> <3486@charon.cwi.nl> <3986@ssc-bee.ssc-vax.UUCP> Date: 16 May 91 19:55:28 GMT carroll@ssc-vax (Jeff Carroll) writes: >... an Intel/Boeing team found that it was possible to achieve very nearly >peak performance from the i860 using very little assembly code, on certain >problems. I just ran a stupid benchmark (the FFT from Numerical Recipies, length 1024, 2000 reps) on both a Sun 4/470 and an Alliant FX/2800. On the Sun, I used f77 -fast; on the Alliant, fortran -O. Performance was within 10% of identical. [Gee, everyone said the i860 was much faster than a Sun; guess I misunderstood.] Now that I've compared the speed of Fortran programs, I'd like to compare the speed of hand-coded assembly versions of the same thing. The Alliant comes with a canned signal processing library which is presumably hand-optimized assembly code. Does anyone know of such a library for the Sun 4? - Dan K