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From: hilfingr@tully.Berkeley.EDU.berkeley.edu (Paul Hilfinger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Mac C Compilers, Benchmarks, Stupidity
Message-ID: <20149@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Mon, 17-Aug-87 16:15:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.20149
Posted: Mon Aug 17 16:15:38 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Aug-87 05:45:57 EDT
References: <3560@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
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Reply-To: hilfingr@tully.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Paul Hilfinger)
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Mike Newton writes:

> ...
> Probably like a lot of Mac II buyers, when I saw the latest issue of Byte,
> I was very disappointed.  The article causing this disapointment was the
> one comparing the Mac II vs. the 80386 based PS2/80. First I was
> disappointed in the article -- I could not tell which compilers were being
> used (I may have just not read the article carefully).  From a lot of
> experience programming the 8086 and the 68020, I was shocked.  The 68020
> __should__ be a faster system, and like a lot of these tests, this seemed
> to be more of a comparison of compilers than machines.  (I can provide a
> couple of references (some good, some bad) on this.  One of them is an IEEE
> article.)
> ...

I showed this article to Robert Dewar at the Courant Institute, NYU, who had the
following reaction.


------

Date: Sun, 16 Aug 87 18:42:54 EDT
From: dewar@acf2.nyu.edu


A couple of comments to whoever wrote this. First I would expect an 80386
to run faster than a 68020 at the same clock rate. The store overlap alone
will improve things. Also I assume that the comparison was on a MAC II
without the memory management chip, does this chip slow things down further?
If so the comparison is unfair in any case, since the 80386 has built in
memory management. Of course the PS2/80 is a fairly poor implementation of
the 80386 -- there are unconditional wait states. The DP386 is generally
faster than the PS2/80, and faster designs with static RAM (e.g. the
PC Limited design), are faster still.

I am quite surprised that anyone would expect the 68020 to be faster than
the 80386, or even as fast, where does this idea come from?

Also the gratuitous comments on the 8086 are of course completely
irrelevant [when talking about the 80386.]

I quite agree that most compilers for BOTH classes of machines are very
poor. This is easy to understand, the compiler markets have largely been
wrecked, and no company can make money selling high quality C compilers
for the end user market. There are just too many people who want cheap
compilers, so this is all the market can provide. My brother has always
complained that he has a multi-million dollar investment depending on
a compiler which costs $400. He has always said that he would be happy
to pay 100 times that amount if it would really make a difference in
support and quality.

Reminds me of the airline market at the moment, where people expect to
be able to go from A to B at ridiculously low fares AND to get first
class service. You can't have it both ways!

[Robert Dewar 
Net Address: dewar@acf2.nyu.edu ]

-------- End of Forwarded Message --------


Paul Hilfinger
University of California

Net Address: hilfingr@ginger.berkeley.edu