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From: andy@solitary.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Binaries and Max Speed
Message-ID: <5922@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 6 Jan 89 20:37:00 GMT
References: <5847@polya> <2700005@prisma>
Sender: news@polya.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: andy@solitary.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 26

In article <2700005@prisma> mo@prisma writes:
[We're discussing whether SPARC's stalling is a big advantage over MIPS
 explicit NOPs in binary portability to implementations that don't need them.]
>run already, even if crippled to some degree.  As for 3%, on a
>100-150 mips machine, that 3% is as fast as what was, until
>recently considered a reasonably quick (if not fast) machine.
>I'm not claiming it's a gigantic win, but it can be a non-trivial one
>for some applications.
     ^^^^
I'm still asking for a SINGLE example.  The application has to perform
acceptably on a 10 MIPS machine yet when it is run on a 100 MIPS
machine, the last 3% performance (almost a third of the performance on
the 10 MIPS box) is crucial.  Oh, and recompiling has to be out of the
question.  (If you push on this a bit more, you'll discover that there
are actually so few "dusty decks" that re-writing them is reasonable.)

>Just remember that not everyone's problem will currently run on a
>workstation-class machine.

Netnews is the only problem I've got that runs on a workstation. :-)
(That's a small lie - they're also fine for mail, editing, and compiling.)

-andy
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