🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <257@etn-rad.UUCP> jru@etn-rad.UUCP (0000-John Unekis) writes:
/In article <7042@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
/>I will quote some figures from Byte magazine, July 1987 issue. I
/>personally do not doubt the Intel benchmarks at all. If they chose to
/>select benchmarks which show the best points of their product, can you
/>...
/>test		68010	68020	68020	80386
/>		7.8MHz	16MHz	12.5MHz	16MHz
/>		1w/s	1w/s	0w/s	0.5w/s
/>		--	881@8	881@12	287@16
/>
/>Fibonacci	 264.0	  71.6	  70.2	   3.1	time in sec
/>Float		 230.0	   4.2	   2.9	   5.4
/>Sieve		  64.7	  14.9	  12.8	   6.0
/>Sort		 111.3	  19.8	  12.6	   9.7
/>Savage		1884.3	   8.8	  24.8	  35.1
/>
/>Whetstones	 574.0	2114.0	2702.0	3703.7	whetstones / sec
/>
/...
/first off - those were dhrystones, not whetstones, one is an integer test,
/the other is floating point.
/
/       I notice that you conveniently forgot the worst 
/       Intel column
/	 80286
/	 8Mhz
/	 1w/s
/	 ----
/Fib       950
/Float     116.36
/Seive     26.71
/Sort      46.53
/Savage    1103.0
/
/ FLAME ON!!!----
/
/I thought that the results of these tests looked particularly bogus,
/so I looked up the BYTE magazine article to see what was going on.
/The most obvious discrepancy was in the fibonacci sequence routine, so 
/I typed in their code verbatim and ran it on two machines for comparison.
/
/On a Motorola 68020 with 68881 at 12 Mhz the test ran in 69.1 seconds
/On an Intel 80386/80287 in full 32 bit mode at 16Mhz it ran in 60.3 seconds
/(Both systems had 1w/s memory and ran UNIX V)
/Even with a 25% clock speed advantage the Intel processor was only ~12%
/faster.
/The machine used in the Byte article must either have been a Gallium Arsenide,
/100Mhz custom chip, or the authors are guilty of a gross clerical error.
/Perhaps they forgot to read the minute portion of the time on their stop
/watch.
/
/I would hate to impugn the reputation of a Magazine like BYTE by suggesting
/that they would publish a test where the results were deliberatley falsified,
/but it is true that the best way to make INTEL look better than Motorola
/is to LIE.

And here's more fuel for the fire:

I have a Stride 440 (68000 @12MHz 1 wait state) that runs the Sieve in
11.40 seconds (100 iterations).  This is faster than BYTE's time for
the Mac II (68020 @16MHz, two wait states). (Yes, the Mac II has two
wait states:  one for the HMMU or the PMMU, one so that NuBus devices
can access mother-board memory safely; besides, it would require 60ns
static rams to run a 16MHz '020 with no wait states.) The Sieve code
on my Stride was produced by an optimizing Modula-2 compiler, not C
or assembly. Also, in BYTE's own preview of the Mac II in the April 
edition, they claimed 0.67 seconds for ten iterations (in other words,
6.7 seconds for 100 iterations)--almost twice as fast as the time
they claim in their more recent benchmarks.  What gives here? (I saw 
a Levco Prodigy (16 MHz 68020) equiped Mac Plus do 10 iterations of the
sieve in 0.67 seconds in the fall of 1985 at Macworld Expo in SF). 

BYTE likes to do benchmarks using interpreted BASIC.  Very well, let's
look at some benchmarks using an interpreted language:  Smalltalk.
These figures are from the September 1987 ParcPlace Systems Newsletter:

						       (Geometric Mean
							of the 15
							standard ST-80
							benchmarks)
(Virtual Machine) (CPU)
Implementation   Machine            Implementor        Performance
                                                        (higher is faster)

PS/68020         Cadmus MSW/5       Georg Heeg, Inc     250 (2.5 x Dorado)
PS/68020         Sun-3/260          ParcPlace Systems   206
PS/68020         Cadmus MSW/4       Georg Heeg, Inc     185
PS/68020         HP 9000/350-c      ParcPlace Systems   151
PS/68020         Sun-3/60           ParcPlace Systems   142
PS/68020         Sun-3/160          ParcPlace Systems   116
PS/68020         Macintosh II       ParcPlace Systems   102
Standard         Dorado             Xerox PARC/SCL      100
PS/68020         Sun-3/50           ParcPlace Systems    89
Tek4406          Tektronix 4406     Tektronix            82
PS/68020         Apollo DN 3000-clr ParcPlace Systems    75 
PS/68020         Apollo DN 3000-b/w ParcPlace Systems    72
ST80 KV5         Fuji Xerox 1161    Fuji Xerox           47
PS/68010         Sun-2/50           ParcPlace Systems    41
ST80KV4.2        Fuji Xerox 1121    Fuji Xerox           41
ST80KV5(*)       Funi Xerox 1161    Fuji Xerox           41
PS/68010         Cadmus 9230        Georg Heeg, Inc      40
PS/68010         Atari 4160         Georg Heeg, Inc      37
PS/68000         Macintosh SE       ParcPlace Systems    33
Smalltalk/AT     IBM PC/386AT       Softsmarts           28
PS/68000         Macintosh Plus     ParcPlace Systems    27
Smalltalk/AT     IBM PC/AT          Softsmarts           18

Now, which architecture is faster?

--Alan "you just have to choose your benchmarks carefully" Lovejoy
 (a  In t