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From: whm@arizona.edu (Bill Mitchell)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.misc,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Between a Sun-4 and a Cray-2
Message-ID: <1883@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: Wed, 19-Aug-87 02:46:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: megaron.1883
Posted: Wed Aug 19 02:46:19 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Aug-87 09:22:59 EDT
References: <7500@shemp.UCLA.EDU> <552@winchester.UUCP>
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 27
Xref: mnetor comp.arch:1844 comp.sys.misc:765 comp.unix.wizards:3785

A couple of weeks ago in article <552@winchester.UUCP>, mash@mips.UUCP
(John Mashey) wrote:

> 1) As a side note, we're not sure where the 10-mips number
> for the Sun-4 came from.  It looks more like 6.5-7.0 mips integer
> (on the VAX 11/780 == 1 ... VAX 8700 == 6 scale).  
> We got this from looking carefully at the published data,
> filling in some holes in the tables, and cross-comparing with other
> RISC systems. [We've got a 40-pager that analyzes the data in detail,
> if anybody is interested.]

We ran our IBS (Inscrutable Benchmark Suite) on a Sun-4/260 and ...
[Before I say what we found, I must point out that Sun said that the machine
that the tests were run on was (1) a prototype (2) running an early version
of the software (3) had a 65ns rather than 60ns clock (4) had something
wrong with the floating point (5) several other things of this ilk that
amount to the suite being run under adverse conditions.] ... found that
at the cpu level the Sun-4 was about 6 (six) mips.  The same tests had been
run on an 8600 and a Sun-3/280 and we got around 4 mips for both of these
machines.

I've yet to see a non-floating point benchmark that shows 10-mip speed on
a Sun-4, using VAXs as a yardstick.

					Bill Mitchell
					whm@arizona.edu
					{allegra,cmcl2,ihnp4,noao}!arizona!whm