Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!winchester!mash From: mash@mips.COM (John Mashey) Newsgroups: comp.sys.m88k Subject: Re: Information wanted on m88000 Risc workstations Keywords: 80386 m88000 Everex Opus UNIX DOS Message-ID: <34321@mips.mips.COM> Date: 10 Jan 90 09:34:13 GMT References: <641@s5.Morgan.COM> <25A64468.11498@paris.ics.uci.edu> <648@s5.Morgan.COM> <25AAE835.16940@paris.ics.uci.edu> Sender: news@mips.COM Reply-To: mash@mips.COM (John Mashey) Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 53 In article <25AAE835.16940@paris.ics.uci.edu> rfg@ics.uci.edu (Ron Guilmette) writes: >>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. But they have been shown, as in page 36 of the January 1990 issue, and earlier ones. I suggest that of the various FP benchmarks, the most representative is the Livermore Loops, where the DS3100 yielded 1.928 MFLOPS (DP) versus 1.48 MFLOPS for the Step 8825 (25Mhz). > >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. Q: Do Whetstones correlate with real performance on real floating-point programs? A: Not very well. > >Also, please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the 3100 cost about >twice as much? No; the Everex described in the article cost $21,995, and the Opus $15,075. I don't have the numbers handy for the DS3100, but it's in the same ballpark; of course the Everex/Opus have a 386 & MSDOS as well, but also don't have as big a screen, I think, so there's generally some apples/oranges comparisons in both directions, depending on what you want. > >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. Malloc only appears explicitly once in the whole set of benchmarks, as part of initialization....Also, understand that these benchmarks are mixtures of small synthetics that try to model different environments: they are NOT applications. -- -john mashey DISCLAIMER: UUCP: {ames,decwrl,prls,pyramid}!mips!mash OR mash@mips.com DDD: 408-991-0253 or 408-720-1700, x253 USPS: MIPS Computer Systems, 930 E. Arques, Sunnyvale, CA 94086