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From: rpw3@amdcad.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.misc,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Atari Transputers ? & A British ST/Amiga Rival ?
Message-ID: <18514@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: Fri, 2-Oct-87 23:04:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdcad.18514
Posted: Fri Oct  2 23:04:19 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 4-Oct-87 01:00:48 EDT
References: <1138@water.waterloo.edu> <2452@cbmvax.UUCP>
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Xref: utgpu comp.sys.atari.st:5072 comp.sys.misc:815 comp.sys.amiga:8420

And to add to what Tim Olson said, it's ironic that the "reference 1 MIPS"
machine, the DEC VAX-11/780, runs about 0.5 "Native MIPS". That is, at some
time in the past, the 780 was compared against some other (probably IBM S/360)
machine for which (on some benchmarks) that machine ran at 1 (native) MIPS,
and so the VAX, being about the same speed (ON THOSE BENCMARKS!), came to be
called a "1 MIPS" machine. But if you look at how many *VAX* instructions a
VAX is executing per second when running the "common" scalar benchmarks
(nroff, ccom, etc.), you'll see that it's about 2 microseconds/instruction,
or about 0.5 Native MIPS.

See, the VAX is *really* a very CISC machine! Each of its instructions does
twice the work of a "1 VAX MIPS" machine!	;-}  ;-}

(Come to think of it, I'll bet that the IBM S/360 architecture running the
Gibson Mix is close to one VAX MIPS per Native MIPS.)


Rob Warnock
Systems Architecture Consultant

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