From: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!sun!megatest!dre Newsgroups: net.micro Title: Benchmarks of machines at Unicom Article-I.D.: megatest.186 Posted: Sat Feb 12 19:34:48 1983 Received: Wed Feb 16 01:04:50 1983 At UNICOM Yin Shih and I took the opportunity to run a simple benchmark on most of the machines on display at the vendor exhibit. This is an attempt at organizing the results. In any benchmark it is important to know 1) what the benchmark tests and 2) whether you care about what the benchmark tests. An example of what I would consider to be a poor benchmark for most purposes is the Whetstone. The Whetstone bashes away at transcendental functions, exercising floating point load, add, and multiply instructions. Unfortunately it uses these instructions with a frequency seldom encountered even in "heavy floating point grinders" such as SPICE. So, to make a long story short, we're going to tell you what we did and what numbers we got, but we're not going to make any claims about which machine is the "fastest" or "best buy." We aren't going to try to interpret the results. Just the facts, ma'am. Also, we did this on our own and not as representatives of Megatest--so flame at us but don't get mad at the company (the only company ENTIRELY composed of Dead Heads! Long Live net.gdead!). Now that we've covered our a**es, let's get to the fun part. The benchmark (for better or worse) is: main() { long i; for (i=0;i<1000000;i++); printf("Done.\n"); } This is obviously completely cpu bound and tests 32 bit integer arithmetic (or at least increment and compare). We ran two tests. These were: /bin/time cc tst.c and /bin/time a.out The compile was quite i/o bound on most systems. Some machines which did very well in the loop had terrible disk access times. Others had reasonable i/o but slow processors. The system configurations and prices stated below are, in most cases, as tested. In some cases the prices quoted us by the salesmen were for other configurations and that is given instead. In a few cases the information was unavailable. These figures may be wrong, but we tried to be as accurate as we could be. "Total" is the sum of user and supervisor time for both tests. Significant digits are what "time" gave us except for "real" times where I seem to have tacked a ".0" on the end of some numbers. The numbers were corrected for the Xenix ports on the TRS model 16, Apple LISA, and Parallel 68000 systems after we had a discussion with some Microsoft folks. It seems that the TRS model 16 has a 30 Hz clock and "time" gave numbers that were off by a factor of two for these machines because all three of them are object file compatible and they just transported utilities over without recompilation. The Microsoft people were quite knowledgeable and very helpful. Thanks, guys. Some systems were running multiuser, so the "real" numbers shouldn't be used for comparisons. The numbers, in increasing "total" order: cc a.out -------------- -------------- System & OS Price Config real user supv real user supv Total ----------- ----- ------ ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----- Amdahl 470/V8 na na 5.49 0.26 0.18 1.29 0.24 0.01 0.69 UTS and VM SEL 32/87 ~$250K na 10.0 1.0 2.5 1.0 0.8 0.0 4.3 32V VAX 11/780 na Emulex SC21 28.0 0.6 1.8 13.0 3.9 0.2 6.5 w/o FP accel. disk controller 4.1BSD w/ CDC 9766s (courtesy of 1-2MB memory Rick Kiessig at (Rick wasn't sure) Fortune Systems) Masscomp $28000 dual 10 MHz 5.0 1.2 2.1 8.0 7.5 0.1 10.9 SIII + 68000s (for Berkeley VM) with a extensions 4KB cache 27 MB winch 1 MB floppy 512KB memory ascii terminal VAX 11/750 ~$100K SC21 w/4 160MB 10.0 0.9 2.4 9.0 8.0 0.3 11.6 w/o FP accel Fujitsu winch 4.1aBSD 2 MB mem Emulex DH (the system I'm using now) Perkin-Elmer 3210 ~$50K 64 MB winchester 6.0 1.0 2.8 9.0 8.7 0.2 12.7 V7+Berkeley extensions 512KB memory +SCCS Parallel 68000 $14K 10MHz 68000 20.0 2.2 3.4 9.0 7.6 0.0 13.2 Xenix 8 serial ports Multibus 16MB winch 1 MB floppy 256KB memory HP-9000 $88000 10MB winch 26.8 2.4 6.8 4.4 4.2 0.1 13.5 HP-UX (SIII) 64MB winch 2 MB memory 512KB floppy plotter color graphics Sun $29,500 Sun Terminal 14.6 1.4 4.5 9.4 7.8 0.6 14.3 4.1cBSD 1 MB memory 84MB winch DCD tape drive 10 MHz 68000 mouse and upgrade to 68010 (The salesman said this would cost $2.5K) Charles River $19,400 12.5MHz 68000 26.7 6.1 3.4 6.3 5.7 0.2 15.4 UNOS 4KB cache 1MB memory 4 serial ports 10 MB winch 1MB floppy Versabus Alcyon APX $29000 512KB memory 17.0 2.7 1.0 14.0 13.1 0.0 16.8 Regulus winchester (size n/a) 68000 (speed n/a) streamer tape drive Q bus Codata 3300 $14000 68000 20.0 3.6 4.5 11.0 10.5 0.1 18.7 V7 (speed n/a) 2 serial ports 12 MB winch 1 MB floppy 320K memory Pacific Micro $13,900 68000 30.0 3.5 4.6 11.0 10.5 0.1 18.7 Super Sun (speed n/a) Unisoft V7 20 MB winch 1MB floppy Multibus 256KB memory Onyx C8002 $17,000 4 MHz Z8000 13.1 2.4 3.9 13.5 13.2 0.1 19.6 V7+Berkeley 20 MB winch extensions DCD tape drive 256KB memory VAX 11/730 na 2-RL02 drives 14.0 2.1 4.1 33.0 14.3 1.0 21.5 4.1BSD memory size n/a Alcyon APS $9950 512KB memory 19.0 10.1 0.3 12.0 11.4 0.0 21.8 Regulus 3 serial ports 10MB removable winchester 8 MHz 68000+ 68451 MMU 1 wait state Zilog S8000 $17000 Z8001 28.0 2.2 4.7 16.0 14.9 0.1 21.9 Model 11 (speed n/a) Zeus (V7 + 18MB winchester Berkeley DCD tape extensions) ZBI bus 256K memory Altos 586 $7990 10 MHz 8086 18.0 1.0 4.3 17.0 16.7 0.2 22.2 Xenix 512K memory minifloppy 10 MB winch 5-8 users Wicat 68000 $17000 8 MHz 68000 26.0 2.8 5.8 15.0 14.7 0.1 23.4 Unisoft up to 3 users V7+SIII+Berkeley 1 MB memory 1 MB floppy 15MB winch Altos 68000 $12990 8 MHz 68000 24.9 5.5 8.8 10.2 9.8 0.1 24.2 Xenix 20 MB winch 512KB floppy 16 serial ports 512K memory Pixel ~15-18K 8 MHz 68000 35.0 4.9 6.4 21.0 12.6 0.3 24.2 V7+Berkeley 1 wait state extensions 512K memory 20 MB winch 2-1MB floppies 4 serial ports Plexus P/25 $16900 Z8000 24.6 3.7 3.4 17.2 17.1 0.1 24.3 SIII+PWB (speed n/a) 512KB memory 32MB winch DCD tape Fortune 32:16 ~$10000 5.5 MHz 68000 19.0 3.2 7.9 15.0 14.0 0.1 25.2 V7 (unbundled)+ 5MB winch extensions 800KB floppy Onyx C8002A $15490 6 MHz Z8000 16.8 2.8 5.9 16.9 16.6 0.1 25.4 SIII (speed n/a) 256K memory 5 serial ports 20 MB winch DCD tape drive TRS Model 16 ~$10000 68000 24.0 3.2 6.0 17.0 16.1 0.3 25.6 Xenix (speed n/a) up to 3 users 12 MB winch 1 MB floppy 256K memory Apple Lisa ~$10000 5 MHz 68000 60.0 6.1 7.6 16.0 12.1 0.1 25.9 Xenix 1 MB memory 5 MB winch 1 MB floppy Apple Lisa ~$10000+ 5 MHz 68000 39.0 5.3 7.2 15.0 14.5 0.1 27.1 Unisoft cost of 1 MB memory second 2-5 MB winch drive 1 MB floppy (n/a) Dual $16660 8 MHz 68000 21.0 5.9 6.1 18.0 17.2 0.2 29.4 Unisoft (10MHz planned) (reconfiguration S100 bus rights cost $2000) 20 MB winch 1 MB floppy 512K memory 4 users BBN C/60 $53000 8 users 9.0 1.4 1.9 27.0 26.0 0.1 29.4 BBN Unix 68MB disk 512KB memory The salesman said this machine was running with C/70 microcode. Momentum Hawk $18000 6 MHz 68000 33.0 4.2 12.6 16.0 12.2 1.6 30.6 model 32/4 (8 MHz planned) V7+Berkeley 1 MB memory extensions+f77 20 MB winch 4 terminals IBM PC+Sritek ~$8000 8 MHz 68000 38.0 8.9 14.8 11.0 10.6 0.2 34.5 68000 card 1 wait state Xenix Davong 5 MB winch 2 floppies 512KB memory Intel 86/330X $16000 8 MHz 8086 16.0 3.0 4.8 37.0 28.6 0.2 36.6 Xenix Multibus 2 users 384 KB memory 35 MB winch Cosmos Lyra $16500 68000 34.0 7.9 8.2 23.0 21.7 0.2 38.0 V7 (SIII planned) (speed n/a) 20 MB winch 1 MB floppy Multibus 512K memory 8 serial ports IBM PC ~$6000 5 MHz 8088 26.0 (est.) 26.8 26.0 0.5 39.5 Mark Williams' 512K memory (est.) Coherent Corvus 10 MB winch IBM monochrome crt National NS16000 n/a 6 MHz NS16032 37.0 4.4 15.5 21.1 19.6 0.6 40.1 4.1BSD 1.5MB memory 20 MB winch DCD tape drive joystick and graphics display PDP 11/23Plus n/a 11/23Plus cpu 26.0 3.3 8.3 30.0 29.2 0.2 41.0 DEC V7M-11 2-RL02s (~$1K per user size of memory n/a license fee) Corvus Unixplex ~$13-14K 8 MHz 68000 40.3 3.5 35.0 14.2 12.5 1.6 52.6 Unisoft OEMs only 512KB memory 2 serial ports 10 MB winch We would appreciate any additional information or corrections to this list. Dave Emberson Yin Shih Megatest Corp. Megatest Corp. 477 Potrero Rd. 477 Potrero Rd. Sunnyvale, CA 94086 Sunnyvale, CA 94086 ucbvax!lbl-csam!megatest!dre ucbvax!lbl-csam!megatest!yin