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From: bb@wjh12.harvard.edu (Brent Byer)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.intel
Subject: Re: i860 overview (long)
Message-ID: <340@wjh12.harvard.edu>
Date: 11 Mar 89 05:30:56 GMT
References: <807@microsoft.UUCP> <92634@sun.uucp> <13322@steinmetz.ge.com>
Reply-To: bb@wjh12.UUCP (Brent Byer)
Organization: Textware Intl., Cambridge MA
Lines: 26

In article <13322@steinmetz.ge.com> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
> .... One of the people here checked his Sun-30
>(68020) against his Sun-4 (SPARC). The three ran troff about 5x faster.
>
One of the signs of competency in a good engineer is that, while (s)he
might not always know the right answer, (s)he should always be able
to detect an obviously wrong one.  Bill Davidsen has presented data
which is bogus by at least a factor of 10; a question, Bill:
	Don't you think you should have verified this data *before*
	trying to use it to support your claims?

>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?
>
n/troff could be very good benchmark candidates, but there are too
many versions, all based on proprietary source code.  I frequently
use our version of troff as a benchmark of various systems, but I can
be certain that I use the *same* sources & test data on each target.
The only surprising results I have seen are that the VAX architecture
seems to perform about 15% poorer with troff, and the i286 does about 10%
better (small model), than their respective results with other tests
would suggest.
[ E.G.:  an 8MHz, 0ws PC/AT clone ran troff 25% faster than a 780 ]

	Brent Byer  (att!ihesa!textware!brent   bb@wjh12.harvard.edu)