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From: saj@chinet.chi.il.us (Stephen Jacobs)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: What's a fair comparison?
Summary: comments on some benchmarks
Keywords: Atari Motorola Intel GNU C ZEOS benchmark
Message-ID: <1991May31.144140.25373@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 31 May 91 14:41:40 GMT
References: <1991May30.145023.1684@chinet.chi.il.us> <1991May30.223629.13096@jato.jpl.nasa.gov>
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 33

In article <1991May30.223629.13096@jato.jpl.nasa.gov> vsnyder@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Van Snyder) writes:
>In article <1991May30.145023.1684@chinet.chi.il.us> saj@chinet.chi.il.us (Stephen Jacobs) writes:
>>I seem to be involved in what is fast becoming a shouting match about relative
>>price and performance of Atari computers vs those based on Intel chips.  One
>>of the main problems is knowing what to compare with which.  So how about we
>>pick some fair yardsticks.  Atari isn't 'Joes Garage Computer Manufactorie',
>>fun with.  Cross-platform benchmarks are damn near impossible (Byte magazine
>>has had several articles on the subject), but I'll modestly propose as a 
>>benchmark the time for GNU C to compile itself, with all temporary files on
>>hard disk.  Any other suggestions?
>>
>Some of the benchmarks people commonly use are Dhrystone (integer performance),
>Whetstone (Floating point performance), Linpack (Floating point performance),
>Livermore loops (Floating point performance), SpecMark (Overall system
>performance, but belongs to SPEC Inc).  The advantage of using these is that
>you don't have to re-do the benchmarks on the other machines, which you
>might not own.  I've seen dhrystone for the ST, maybe at atari.archive?
>

I know that linpack (which used to be considered the great 'real-world'
benchmark) is no longer considered a fair comparison of machines because it's
too architecture-sensitive (especially to cache and super-scalar aspects).
Whetstone never seems to have caught on for micros, perhaps someone knows
why and will say.  I guess Byte eventually picked a suite of benchmarks,
which they make available in source, but they hedged pretty heavily about
counting on them across architectures.  I'm assuming that the people who
participate in this discussion have some applications that exercise a processor
pretty thoroughly, and might be considered as successors to Linpack.
For what it's worth, I talked to a friend who rides herd on some big iron,
and he says that simply saying that beyond a certain machine speed my biggest
application (chromatographic data processing) is disk-bound sounds like a 
benchmark to him.  I disagree, but I'll toss it into the discussion.
                                     Steve      saj@chinet.chi.il.us