Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!muslix.llnl.gov!jac
From: jac@muslix.llnl.gov (James Crotinger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Recommendations needed about A2500/30 as research workstation
Message-ID: <51038@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 5 Mar 90 19:14:58 GMT
References: <jac@muslix.llnl.gov> <9003041700.AA10475@jade.berkeley.edu>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: jac@gandalf.llnl.gov (James Crotinger)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/UC Davis
Lines: 33

In article <9003041700.AA10475@jade.berkeley.edu> GORRIEDE@UREGINA1.BITNET (Dennis Robert Gorrie) writes:
>MIPS = Meaningless Information from Pushy Salesmen
>
>Seriously though, I was under the impression that MIPS is realy only meant
>to be used to bench processors of single family.  There is no direct
>correlation between the number of instructions executed and the work done.
>And, the instructions are not constant from processor to processor.
>

  MIPS = a computer magazine now know as Personal Workstation. They have
done a wide range of benchmarks on a variety of machines. This include
a set of multitasking benchmarks calle the AIM Suite which attempts to
measure performance of real-life applications of various types under
various loads. For instance, typical dhrystone-2 performance for 
20-25 MHz '386 machines under Xenix seems to be 5000-9000 and for the
AIM benchmarks in Software-Development/Engineering-Scientific they seem to 
be in the 300-400/200-300 range. Sun's 3/80 only did 4461 dhrystones
and only scored 646/609 on the avg. AIM scores. (The Sparcstation 1 did
20,000 and 185/120 and the Sun 386i did 8265 and 452/240). I think the
only '030 machine that has even been competitive with the hordes of '386
machines is the HP-370 (and now the 375). The 370 has a 33 MHz '030
and did 13,391 dhrystones and 158/126 on the AIM averages. This edges
out the Everex Step 386/33 which did 12,275 and 213/169 (under Xenix;
it did 17,105 dhrystones under DOS). So, it's not clear that the '030
is inherently slower. But it does seem that the '030 systems on the
market right now tend to be slower than the majority of the '386 machines.

>+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>|Dennis Gorrie                 'Chain-Saw Tag...                        |
>|GORRIEDE AT UREGINA1.BITNET                    Try It, You'll Like It!'|
>+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

  Jim