Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!bzs
From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: m88000 benchmarks (and C vs ASM)
Message-ID: <23406@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 17 Jun 88 16:55:56 GMT
References: <1941@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <3208@ubc-cs.UUCP> <12112@ut-sally.UUCP>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 22
In-reply-to: nather@ut-sally.UUCP's message of 17 Jun 88 14:57:02 GMT


>Gosh!  Does this mean that careful hand-coding can yield a factor of 2
>faster code even on a RISC machine?  I know it means that on a CISC machine
>because I've done better than that myself. (Current record: a factor of 22
>on a Nova computer, me vs. Fortran, with the sieve benchmark).
>
>But where does this leave all the CS statements that assembly-language
>coding is no longer needed?  Are factors of 2 really unimportant?
>-- 
>Ed Nather
>Astronomy Dept, U of Texas @ Austin

Um, Ed, before you jump (or is that JRST) to all sorts of conclusions
note that the 88000 is a very new architecture, I doubt they have the
compilers up to snuff yet nor would be disappointed if they were still
working on it.

It might be interesting to see what the case is on RISC systems with
more mature compilers (which generally means "working for a year
now".)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University