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From: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Newsgroups: net.micro.68k,net.arch
Subject: Re: 80286 v.s. 68010 -- the debate continues?
Message-ID: <529@oakhill.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 12-Sep-85 18:15:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: oakhill.529
Posted: Thu Sep 12 18:15:09 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Sep-85 09:38:08 EDT
References: <405@scirtp.UUCP>
Reply-To: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Distribution: net
Organization: Motorola Inc. Austin, Tx
Lines: 42
Xref: watmath net.micro.68k:1119 net.arch:1788
Summary: 

In article <405@scirtp.UUCP> dfh@scirtp.UUCP (David F. Hinnant) writes:

>
>        used in the report are flawed;  some  critically.   Their
>        'C'  translation  of the Whetstone benchmark as published
>        has several errors:
>

Actually, there is a bias thrown in which is far larger than any errors
mentioned here.  The Whetstone is suppose to have an outer loop running
from 1 to 10 to cause the generation of 1 million whetstones.  However,
if you examine Intel's code the outer loop only runs through two times.
Since they give the time for the result and not the value in Whetstones
this makes it easy to miss the 5 times off factor as normally a run time of
one second means a value of 1,000 KWhets.

Intel's time would relate to 625 KWhets which I knew was impossible.  But
it wasn't until several weeks later that I finally spotted the loop count
change and realized that the value should really have been around 125.

On the same subject, we have just completed an extensive analysis of the
Intel benchmark report which goes into detail on the many irregularities
found.  The conclusions reached when up-to-date systems and proper procedures
are used are quite a contrast to those reached by Intel.

For those of you following the MIPS debate there is a section of interest.
Intel tries to show that by looking only at instruction clock times the
286 is just as fast as a '020.  About as believable as their claim based
on their UNIX benchmark set that (and I quote) "The 6 MHz 286/310 outperforms
all of the machines based on a 68010 as well as the VAX machines " (Pg 9.)
Note this claim includes the VAX 780.

Their conclusion puts the IBM PC/AT at 98 percent the performance of the 780.
They further claim that a 12 MHz 286 is 2.4 times faster than a 780.
Everyone expects marketing hype from vendors (Motorola included, of course)
but this is just down-right silly.

Our new benchmark report should be in the local Motorola sales offices in
a week or so.  Try to get the Intel benchmark booklet from Intel so you can
see these things for yourself.

  --  Dave Trissel


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