Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!sun!cramer@sun.com
From: cramer@sun.com (Sam Cramer)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: i860 Dhrystones
Keywords: i860 N10 Floating Point Dhrystones
Message-ID: <95013@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 21 Mar 89 01:47:20 GMT
References: <39388@oliveb.olivetti.com> <15475@winchester.mips.COM>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: cramer@sun.com (Sam Cramer)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 31
In-reply-to: mash@mips.COM (John Mashey)

In article <15475@winchester.mips.COM>, mash@mips (John Mashey) writes:
>So far, Intel:
>	-published the results of EXACTLY ONE integer benchmark (Dhrystone
>	1.1 & 2.1) actually measured on this machine (@ 33MHz)
>	-features this number prominently in its marketing claims
>	(well, actually, it features the numbers that would be gotten at 40MHz,
>	or sometimes 50MHz)
>	-uses it frequently to claim superiority over other processors
>	-in its performance document, describes Dhrystone WITHOUT THE SLIGHTEST
>	TRACE OF CAVEATS about the care with which these results must be
>	interpreted, despite the fact that the Dhrystone sources give such
>	caveats, and that the Dhrystone table in the Intel document comes
>	straight from a document that takes great pains to warn the reader
>	to be very careful about interpretation.

Intel is not the only company to do this.  In the "DECstation 3100
Performance Summary" distributed by DEC, the SINGLE integer benchmark shown
is Dhrystone 2.1.  The text that accompanies these results contains no
warning regarding the tendency of Dhrystone to overstate "real-world"
integer performance.  In fact, the Dhrystone results are used to calculate
"price-performance" ratios relative to two Sun machines (a vital metric for
those users who spend all day running Dhrystones).  This section of the
document (titled "CASE and Dhrystone"!) goes on to imply that these
Dhrystone results promise good performacne on a CASE workload.

It seems that when DEC acquired RISC technology from MIPS, they overlooked
MIPS's benchmarking know-how.



Sam Cramer	sun!cramer  cramer@sun.com