🚀 go-pugleaf

Mel Martinez (mem@jhu.edu) wrote:

: Mathematica?

sure, Mathematica, like Photoshop, if I recall correctly, were more "Mac
Friendly" Apps, and did see to perform nicely on most Macs.  However,
I haven't seen any standardized Mathematica benchmark which compared a 
high end PPC604 to a PPro box.  Please post again when you have something.

: As far as benchmarks go, all interested parties should check out the HINT
: benchmarks homepage:

: http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/HINT/

: I think HINT goes a long way towards removing a lot of biases from many
: benchmarks since the HINT evaluates the system as the problem scales from
: small to large, showing clearly the effect of caches, external bus speed,
: etc.  Give it a look-see.

HINT is not a "Commercial Application" either...

but sure, are you sure that it's the best that you can do? You might as 
well use SPEC, which, with the release of a new compiler for PPC chips, 
now have pushed the PPC numbers up higher against the Pentium, but not
in the P6 range.   Here are some numbers....

SPEC...  (these numbers are used to scale comparison with the HINT numbers)
(all with optimizing compilers running on native OS  i.e. no excuses)

IBM 43P  PPC604 @ 133 MHz. W/512K L2 cache
http://www.specbench.org/osg/cpu95/results/res9509/p036.html
gets a SPEC95INT of 4.45  SPEC95FP of 3.31

Dell Dimension  Pentium@120 Mhz W/512K cache.
ftp://ftp.cdf.toronto.edu/pub/spectable
gets a SPEC95INT of 3.53  SPEC95FP of 2.26

Intergraph TDZ300 PPro@200 Mhz. 256K internal L2
http://www.specbench.org/osg/cpu95/results/res9512/p040.html
gets SPEC95INT of 8.04 SPEC95FP of 5.82

Now let's look at HINT with numbers obtained from page above.
(Powermac 9500 using metroworks c 6.0  Pentium using gcc with 386 optimization
fairly outdated optimizations)

Apple PowerMac 9500 @ 132 MHz 3.47 QMIPS
Pentium	@120 MHz 2.70 QMIPS 
No PPro numbers.

Hint says that a system using a 120 MHz Pentium is approximately 23% slower
than a 132 MHz Apple PMac 9500.  SPEC says that Integerwise, a system using
the 120 MHz Pentium is 20% slower than a PPC604@133 Mhz. (floating point,
the PPC604 is ~35% faster at this frequency comparison)  Remarkably, they
seem to agree to a certain extent, about the relative speed of a PPC604
chip (@132/3 MHz) vs a P5 @ 120 MHz.

There have been rumblings from Mr Ragosta on this precise topic about MacWay's
private mailings that with a new compiler, the PMac9500's numbers jumped to 
something like 5.7 QMIPs, and that the best they could obtain on the PPro
was a 4.0  This is simply evidence which shows that with better compilers,
these QMIPs score will no doubt climb, and HINT, like SPEC, are benchmarks
that are heavily compiler dependent.  As I've said, perhaps someone would
like to get a whole list of cross platform applications together, and 
users could just look at the subsets of the applications that they're likely
to use and look at the speed comparisons.  That Mathematica site, whose
URL I have now lost, seems like a good start. How about someone keeping 
track of all the application benchmark scores, from Photoshop to Word.

(personal side note. from looking at all those numbers above, I have come 
to the conclusion that the PPC604 is approximately 10% faster at the same
clock speed than Pentium, given roughly equivalent configurations, i.e. 
same L2 cache size.  However, Pentiums are currently available at a slightly 
faster clock speed. Incidently, PPC604's have 3.6 million transistors, and
Pentiums have 3.3 million, so the performace per transistor-MHz for the 
two chips are very very roughly, the same. However, Intel appears to have
an advantage at this time, due to difference in process technology. Intel's
133, 150 and 166 Mhz Pentiums are all fabbed on Intel's .35 micron process
technology, and IBM's PPC604 100, 120 and 133 MHz [the 150 Mhz process 
technology is under dispute, no reputable source for clarification] are
all fabbed on the .5 micron process. Bottom line is that the Pentium die
is 90 mm^2, and the PPC604 die is 196 mm^2 and so Intel could get 2 
pentiums out of the same piece of silicon for every 604 that IBM could
make.)

: Cheers,

: Mel Martinez
: The Johns Hopkins University
: Dept. of Physics
: mem@jhu.edu