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From: elwell@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Clayton Elwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: BYTE MAG (We don't even rate...)
Message-ID: <1295@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: Mon, 9-Nov-87 11:27:10 EST
Article-I.D.: tut.1295
Posted: Mon Nov  9 11:27:10 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Nov-87 04:42:30 EST
References: <12346169899024@G.BBN.COM> <588@auscso.UUCP> <434@srs.UUCP>
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer and Information Science
Lines: 29

matt@srs.UUCP (Matt Goheen) writes:
    
    Why is it that people just can't face facts.  The 80386 is just plain
    faster than a 68020 of the same clock speed for doing your typical
    "benchmarky" type things.  I have yet to see a benchmark say anything
    to the contrary.  Even Sun's latest "A RISC Tutorial" says that the 80386
    benchmarks faster than the 68030!  Now, I'm not saying that the 80386 is
    a great processor (or that I would ever buy a machine that had one in it),
    but let's face the facts.

The only reason I am posting this instead of mailing it is that it
contains a common misconception.  The clock speed has nothing to do
with the speed of the processor or the system, since the clock is used
differently in different systems.  The closest thing to a "common
factor" for comparison is the memory cycle time, since that is usually
the bottleneck in real world systems.  One of the big advantages of
the 68030 it's intelligent bus interface, which lets you use slower
memory without taking a performance hit.

If you compare processors on the basis of memory cycle time, you get
much more intelligible results.  Even so, there is (so far) no
absolute way to compare things that are reasonably different.  Intel
and Motorola processors qualify as reasonably different :-).

-- 
Clayton M. Elwell

    UUCP: ...!cbosgd!cis.ohio-state.edu!elwell
    ARPA: elwell@ohio-state.arpa (if you feel lucky...)