Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!oliveb!Ozona!chase
From: chase@Ozona.orc.olivetti.com (David Chase)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: i860 Dhrystones
Keywords: i860 N10 Floating Point Dhrystones
Message-ID: <39506@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Date: 20 Mar 89 18:33:22 GMT
References: <39388@oliveb.olivetti.com> <15475@winchester.mips.COM>
Sender: news@oliveb.olivetti.com
Reply-To: chase@Ozona.UUCP (David Chase)
Organization: Olivetti Research Center, Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 33

In article <15475@winchester.mips.COM> mash@mips.COM (John Mashey) writes:

>Since you work at a site well-known to be working on i860s, perhaps you
>could suggest for us the "programs that you use every day"
 
X11, GNU emacs, make, cc (as, ld), tex, dvi2ps, iptex (widely accessible),
m2c, m2l, m2make, m3cfe, m3be (not accessible, not all portable either).

>that you run on an i860,

None -- several very important ones only run on 68K boxes, and have
not even been ported to SunOS 4.*.  I tend to be conservative in
moving to new hardware and software.

>and performance thereof,

I'm not sure, but I don't think I could even if I had the numbers.
When in doubt, I don't comment publicly on Olivetti endeavors, or on
companies with whom we appear to be working.  I seem to recall (from
my student days) agreements with DEC and IBM barring me from
publishing benchmarks or bug reports for products not yet released to
the rest of the world, so I'll assume that such an agreement probably
holds here.

In general, I think that I am I/O- and bad software-bound, not
CPU-bound.  (That is, I am CPU bound, but only because some critical
software is Really Stupid.  It would be helped by a faster cpu, but
that solution (though practical and probably the one I'll use) offends
me.)

Benchmarks will appear via e-mail.

David