Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!b.gp.cs.cmu.edu!Ralf.Brown@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU
From: Ralf.Brown@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Norton Si
Message-ID: <24eac6d6@ralf>
Date: 17 Aug 89 14:08:22 GMT
Organization: Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science
Lines: 18
In-Reply-To: <478@v7fs1.UUCP>

In article <478@v7fs1.UUCP>, sv@v7fs1.UUCP (Steve Verity) wrote:
}        Anyone out there know just what the heck Norton's SI
}measures?  The utility tells us that it is measuring performance
}relitive to the PC.  Still, what does *that* mean?  

SI basically measures the performance of the multiply instruction....  The
numbers have meaning for comparison only when comparing systems with identical
processors, as different CPU types take different numbers of clock cycles for
multiplication, and those different clock cycles are not representative of
overall performance.  SI overstates V20/V30 performance by about 60%, and
80286 performance by about 100% (i.e. a 286 with a 10.1 rating is really about
five times as fast as a 4.77 8088 overall).
--
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