Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!umd5!uvaarpa!mcnc!decvax!decwrl!pyramid!prls!mips!mash From: mash@mips.COM (John Mashey) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: HP825 math 15x SLOWER than 825 Message-ID: <1951@winchester.mips.COM> Date: 30 Mar 88 08:01:16 GMT References: <830004@bgphp1.UUCP> Reply-To: mash@winchester.UUCP (John Mashey) Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 42 In article <830004@bgphp1.UUCP> rclark@bgphp1.UUCP (Roger N. Clark) writes: >I have benchmarked the HP9000 series 825 using number crunching >programs and find: > The 825 is 5 to 7 times SLOWER than a single cpu 500!!!!! > A Multitasking, CPU intensive Benchmark > > Real Time >----------------------------------------------------------------------- > Number of Tasks >System 1 2 3 4 5 7 10 12 >----------------------------------------------------------------------- >HP9000/500 3 CPUs 5.9 6.0 6.3 8.4 10.5 14.7 21.5 27.8 >HP900/825 HPUX1.2 29.1 58.1 87.2 116.3 145.6 205.0 291.5 350.1 MIPS M/1000 .7 1.0 1.3 1.8 2.4 3.1 4.6 HP9000/825 GUESS 2 3 4 6 7 9 14 .... The 825's FPU must be broken or not there. As one calibration, the FORTRAN SP Linpack MFLOPS for these are: .62 HP9000 Series 825S .098 HP9000 Series 500 As another, from other FP benchmarks we've seen, we'd guess an 825S to have about 30% of the performance of one of our MIPS M/1000s, whose numbers were added above. As can be seen, the 825 appears consistently about a factor of 20 slower than you'd expect. Trying this on one of our boxes with no FPU slows it down by about a 40X [kernel emulation], so the 825 may be doing such emulation also. I'd really be surprised if it were anything other than that. I think HP is pretty conservative and realistic on benchmarking: see, for example, the "HP 9000 Series 800 Performance Brief", 5/87, a fine document, well-written, with a broad coverage of useful benchmarks. (This is presumably gettable from local HP offices (?)) -- -john mashey DISCLAIMER: UUCP: {ames,decwrl,prls,pyramid}!mips!mash OR mash@mips.com DDD: 408-991-0253 or 408-720-1700, x253 USPS: MIPS Computer Systems, 930 E. Arques, Sunnyvale, CA 94086