Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: RISC bashing at USENIX Message-ID: <11504@steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 12 Jul 88 18:17:30 GMT References: <6888@ico.ISC.COM> <11496@steinmetz.ge.com> <6965@ico.ISC.COM> Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 30 In article <6965@ico.ISC.COM> rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes: | > 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... | | OK, so which benchmarks are the good ones? Note that the one that EE Times | gave such prominent coverage was one of the simplest--a loop with just 4 | calculations (+-*/) on 16-bit integers, running 1 to 15 copies at a time. The decision is yours... NN gives the result of the test and what it measures. I don't disagree that considering (any) one benchmark as an indicator is probably a waste, but with a selection of results you can compare two (or more) machines in those areas which apply to your situation. I have a UNIX benchmark suite which I have run on a number of machines for my personal edification. It measures some raw performance numbers such as the speed of arithmetic for all data types, trancendental functions, test and branch for int and float, disk access and transfer times for large and small files, speed of bit fiddling such as Grey to binary, etc. Then I measure speed of compile, performance under multitasking load, speed of pipes and system calls, and a few other things. The *one* thing I measure which consistently represents the overall performance of the machine is the real time to run the entire benchmark suite. -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me