🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <13322@steinmetz.ge.com> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>One problem with any chip which requires alligned data is that
>performance suffers when addressing bytes, to the point that a program
>may become impractical. One of the people here checked his Sun-30
>(68020) against his Sun-4 (SPARC). The three ran troff about 5x faster.
>This doesn't mean RISC is bad in a workstation, but it can have
>performance problems in software we take for granted.
>
>A question: has anyone benchmarked nroff/troff on the VAXstation 3100
>(VAX) and DECstation 3100 (MIPS)? Would some of the MIPS readers like to
>comment on performance in this area vs. 68020 or 80386?

Something's wrong somewhere: I'd expect a Sun4/200 to be 2X or so faster than
a Sun3/200; I've never seen anything where a Sun-3 would be 5X faster.

The MIPS-based things run them at the rates you'd expect; there's an
nroff benchmark that's been in the Performance Brief forever; and it also
has Sun3/4 numbers.

I do NOT think there's a penalty for addressing bytes: both of these
machines have full support for storing and [signed/unsigned] loading bytes.
There is a penalty for accessing unaligned words, in both cases,
although R2000s have special instructions to mitigate the penalty.

Anyway, please get your friend to supply some data, because it sounds wrong.
-- 
-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
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