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From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: LightspeedC 3.0 Review (long)
Message-ID: <76000274@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 22 Jul 88 02:39:00 GMT
References: <7215@cup.portal.com>
Lines: 33
Nf-ID: #R:cup.portal.com:7215:p.cs.uiuc.edu:76000274:000:1626
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Jul 21 21:39:00 1988


Here are the relevant statistics from comp.arch:

Model		Proc	Clock	O/S	Compiler/Options	noReg	Reg
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mac Plus	68000	7.83	Sys4.2	Lightspeed C 2.15	719	789
Mac Plus	68000	7.83	Sys4.2	Lightspeed Pascal 1.11a	781	781 
Mac Plus	68000	7.83	Sys4.2	MPW Pascal 2.0.2 -r [1]	832	832
Mac II		68020	15.67	MultiF	Lightspeed C 2.15	2469	2469
AST Premium/286 80286	10	MSDos3.3 Microsoft C 5.10 [2]	3309	3309
Sun 3/260	68020	25.0	SunOS4.5 gcc 1.17		6993	7012

[1] -r [no range check] switch
[2] Betatest compiler, options were -AS/-AC/-AL -Ox, fastest '286 PC tested

Someone said their Mac II achieves 2941 Dhrystones -- that is not bad.
Linear extrapolation indicates that the Sun gcc compiler should attain
4395 Dhrystones on a 15.67 Mhz Mac II.  I have heard that the gcc
compiler supposedly does a good job of automatically assigning
variables to registers.  Apple's pre-assignment of certain values to
certain registers in the Mac OS no doubt slows down ALL C programs on
the Macintosh, since you are FORCED to preallocate certain registers
for certain purposes.

I refuse to believe that the Mac OS, with no multitasking and very
little overhead, is a significant drag on the CPU (relative to SunOS).
What I wonder is: Does the Sun have a custom cache memory, or is
SunOS inaccurately timing this benchmark, or does Sun main memory cycle
faster than 120ns * 15.67Mhz / 25.0Mhz ?

Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,ihnp4,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies