Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!jarthur!uci-ics!rfg
From: rfg@ics.uci.edu (Ron Guilmette)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.m88k
Subject: Re: Information wanted on m88000 Risc workstations
Keywords: 80386 m88000 Everex Opus UNIX DOS
Message-ID: <25AAE835.16940@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 10 Jan 90 07:45:56 GMT
References: <641@s5.Morgan.COM> <25A64468.11498@paris.ics.uci.edu> <648@s5.Morgan.COM>
Reply-To: rfg@ics.uci.edu (Ron Guilmette)
Organization: UC Irvine Department of ICS
Lines: 44

In article <648@s5.Morgan.COM> amull@Morgan.COM (Andrew P. Mullhaupt) writes:
>
>1. We have extensive need for Berkeley extensions in our software.
>We also use Sun's memory mapped files a whole lot. The System V
>alternative (shared memory) is OK, but we're pretty leery of any
>System V that isn't practically Release 4. Can I get close enough to
>Sun OS with an Aviion (Everex 8825, Opus 8120, etc.) If I can
>I may very well get one.

DG/UX on the AViiOn has lots of popular BSD extensions like long filenames,
symbolic links, memory mapped files, and probably many others I don't know
about.

>Yeah, well that DecStation 3100 kind of stomps these 88000 boxes for
>double precision. And the application benchmarks in that issue show
>just how nasty the threat is from the 486 (e.g. the Cheetah Gold is

I don't know where you are getting your numbers.  The 3100 didn't even
make either of the "Best Performance" or "Best Price/Performance" lists
in that article, so the numbers for the 3100 were not even shown.

What was shown however were the single and double precision Whetstone
numbers for MIPS's own MIPS-based R2030 system (which I would think
should be quite similar to the DEC product in terms of performance).
These independently published numbers clearly show that the AViiON
beats the hell out of MIPS-based systems on single precision Whetstones
and looses by only about 10% on double precision.  I would hardly call
that 10% "stomping".  You probably would never even notice the difference
in practice.

Also, please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the 3100 cost about
twice as much?

Finally, note that the application benchmark numbers shown in that article
were possibly somewhat misleading because they were probably done with
DG/UX 4.10 which came with a horrible implementation of malloc() in libc.a.
Most good sized C applications rely heavily on a good fast malloc() and can
suffer dramatically if they are linked with a malloc which has poor
performance.

The malloc implementation has been totally replaced in DG/UX 4.20.  It's
light-years better now.

// rfg