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From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.intel
Subject: Re: i860 overview (long)
Message-ID: <13322@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 7 Mar 89 16:38:05 GMT
References: <807@microsoft.UUCP> <92634@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 14

One problem with any chip which requires alligned data is that
performance suffers when addressing bytes, to the point that a program
may become impractical. One of the people here checked his Sun-30
(68020) against his Sun-4 (SPARC). The three ran troff about 5x faster.
This doesn't mean RISC is bad in a workstation, but it can have
performance problems in software we take for granted.

A question: has anyone benchmarked nroff/troff on the VAXstation 3100
(VAX) and DECstation 3100 (MIPS)? Would some of the MIPS readers like to
comment on performance in this area vs. 68020 or 80386?
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me