From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Newsgroups: fa.info-vax Title: Re: DEC-20 vs. VAX Article-I.D.: ucbvax.7973 Posted: Fri Jul 9 19:04:13 1982 Received: Sun Jul 11 03:14:08 1982 >From MILLER@SRI-NIC Fri Jul 9 19:00:07 1982 When I was at DEC, I had the opportunity to perform an extensive benchmark on floating point FORTRAN on a 2060 and a VAX. Hardware config's were: 2060: 512 Kwords memory 2 RP06 Public Structure VAX: 2 MegaBytes memory 1 RP06 file system There were five programs to be run. They produced a moderate amount of printouts, about 200 pages as I recall. I cannot remember the exact timings, as this was close to three years ago, but in four out of five cases, the 2060 was ahead of the VAX. The best case was a 28% performance improvement on the 2060 vrs the VAX, and the worst case was 12% slower. As I recall, the total benchmark ran 25% faster on the 2060. As for relative performance, the PDP-10 can queue up multiple page transfers at a time. The VAX is limited to 1 I/O operation at a time (I.e., queue, wait, queue, wait, etc.) I have also seen a relatively small user base bring a moderate size VAX to it's knees. 8 users should not be able to do this, especially since they were not doing anything exotic. On the whole, if you want a batch oriented Fortran machine, I'd say the VAX is a win. However, if you want good performance on batch and timesharing, plus a pretty sexy Fortran machine to boot, I'd go with a PDP-10. -HWM -------