Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Next computer (Re: CISC Silent Spring)
Message-ID: <2103@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 8 Feb 90 19:01:37 GMT
References: <8859@portia.Stanford.EDU> <5190@convex.convex.com>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 26

In article <5190@convex.convex.com> swarren@convex.com (Steve Warren) writes:

| I have seen assertions in several places that the '040 is faster than
| SPARC at equal clock rates.  Does anyone have 'real' knowledge about
| this?

  The only comparison which counts is the performance at the highest
production clockrate. When I buy a workstation I don't care about RISC
vs. CISC, or "clock rate efficiency" (there's a marketing term if I ever
heard one), I care about how many clock seconds it takes to run my job.
If the job is CPU bound that maps one to one into CPU sec.

  Arguing about benchmarks between a production chip and an engineering
sample chip is interesting but not informative. Let's talk about the
speed of SPARC in 200MHz GAs or ECL. I hear there are cooling problems
and the chip can become litterally vaporware ;-)

  Let's not take this too seriously, I will be very interested in
benchmarks of production 040 machines against production SPARC machines,
when both exist at the same time. I suspect that the chips would run
about the same speed based on use of SPARC and reading of the same
dribble of tech info I've seen (ie. benchmarks will be less than 2:1
different, and not all will show the same chip faster).
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
            "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me