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From: jaw@aurora.UUCP (James A. Woods)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Will the real 10 mips machine please stand up?
Message-ID: <905@aurora.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 18-Aug-87 17:56:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: aurora.905
Posted: Tue Aug 18 17:56:29 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Aug-87 05:45:50 EDT
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Mt. View, Ca.
Lines: 32
Keywords: compress benchmark


# "Well done is quickly done." -- Augustus Caesar 

     Below please find a small scalar integer benchmark, easy to test on
UNIX machines.  It hashes around nearly randomly in a 3/4 MB address space.

		time compress /usr/dict/words

	        u+s    user   sys

VAX 11/780     14.7    13.6   1.1	(4.3bsd, no asm assist ifdef)
Sun  3/180      5.9	5.5   0.4	(3.2 OS)	
Mips M/500  	3.2     2.7   0.5
Sun  3/2x0       ?			(feel free to fill in this fig.)
Sun  4/260	2.8	2.6   0.2	(machine sun!plaid)
Mips M/800      1.9	1.7   0.2 
Cray 2		1.8	1.81  0.06
Mips M/1000	1.8	1.5   0.3	(systime anomaly -- high load ave.?)

Figures for Mips are courtesy mips!dce, for the Sun 4 courtesy sun!chuq;
VAX 11/780, Sun 3/180, and Cray 2 runs were made at NASA Ames.  The stock
4.3 /usr/dict/words amounts to 198KB.  Disks all are Fujitsu Eagles except
on the Cray 2.

     Comment:  Results support the MIPS general integer benchmark claims.
Like much code written on Vaxen, 'compress' exhibits more than a few
instructions per function call.  I have a faster 'compress' algorithm
in mind which would index sparse data in 2-16MB -- at this point in the
time/space tradeoff curve, one would see better performance from designs
with the better TLB/virtual memory system.

     -- James A. Woods (ames!jaw)