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From: mash@mips.COM (John Mashey)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Integer/Multiply/Divide on Sparc
Message-ID: <34058@mips.mips.COM>
Date: 3 Jan 90 02:29:29 GMT
References: <158@csinc.UUCP> <787@stat.fsu.edu> <42701@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <788@stat.fsu.edu> <42737@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <KHB.90Jan2121328@chiba.kbierman@sun.com> <5842@ncar.ucar.edu>
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In article <5842@ncar.ucar.edu> thor@stout.UCAR.EDU (Rich Neitzel) writes:
>
>With all the talk about this subject I do not recall seeing any benchmarking
>of a sparc or any other system for that matter. The following table lists times
>generated by the Plum-Hall benchmark routines. (They were posted a while back
>to comp.misc.sources). There are three things that really stand out to my
	Could somebody post the critical parts of this again so we can
	look at it?  Although I have high respect for Plum-Hall in general,
	I'm always nervous about micro-level benchmarks.  Now, I hate to have
	to defend SPARC :-), but I must: realistic integer benchmarks
	that I know [like the SPEC ones] simply don't correlate with
	the results claimed below, at least not very much.
	The RISC machines are noticably faster on actual integer programs....

>	2> In general, there is little difference between the RISC and 
>	   CISC machines. For example the 68030 9000/370, 9000/835 and the SS1
>	   all have very close timings. In fact, except for call+ret and 
>	   floating point, the 68030 has better timing. Even among the "1st"
>	   generation machines the 68020 based 3/260 beats the 4/260 in the
>	   same areas.

Again, this is why it would be nice to post the benchmark; one must
always be very careful of micro-level benchmarks: I just don't believe
that one can generalize from these results into thinking that a
33Mhz 68030 has faster integer performance overall than the RISCs...
-- 
-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
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