Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mandrill!gatech!ncar!ames!ucsd!ucsdhub!esosun!seismo!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: RISC bashing at USENIX
Message-ID: <11496@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 11 Jul 88 15:19:07 GMT
References: <6888@ico.ISC.COM>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 29

In article <6888@ico.ISC.COM> rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes:
| 
| "Neal Nelson and Associates" had a booth at the USENIX vendor's exhibition
| whose sole purpose seemed to be RISC-bashing.  Although they purportedly
| have developed a set of tests, which they call their "Business Benchmark
| (R)" for helping people make realistic comparisons of machines under
| realistic loads, in fact even basic descriptions of the tests cast serious
| doubt on their real usefulness.  Some of the tests seem overly simplistic;
| others contain obvious biases toward or against certain types of hardware
| and/or I/O system software.

  Neal Nelson presents the results of his benchmarks and the description
of each test. You are free to interpret them any way you want. That's
not a flame, just a reminder that if you choose to interpret his results
as RISC bashing, then you seem to have decided that RISC is better, and
that a benchmark which doesn't show that is either biased or useless.

  We have looked at the NN benchmarks for a number of machines (I
obviously can't say which ones), and my personal reaction is that they
are reasonable and valid for business applications. If your application
is something else, why not get a benchmark suite which tests that,
rather than blasting NN?

  I don't consider ANY benchmark to be the whole story on a machine,
even my own.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me