Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!hplabs!cae780!leadsv!esl!ian From: ian@esl.UUCP (Ian Kaplan) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Why is SPARC so slow? Message-ID: <546@esl.UUCP> Date: 18 Dec 87 02:20:30 GMT References: <1078@quacky.UUCP> <8809@sgi.SGI.COM> <6964@apple.UUCP> <344@ma.diab.UUCP> <538@esl.UUCP> <1156@winchester.UUCP> Reply-To: ian@esl.UUCP (Ian Kaplan) Organization: ESL, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA. Lines: 66 In article <1156@winchester.UUCP> mash@winchester.UUCP (John Mashey) writes: >Ian: since you have a 4/280, perhaps you might offer some benchmarks, >which would add to our knowledge of a (controversial) topic. >In particular, it would be wonderful if you've got any large, >actual integer applications, especially if they can be made public-domain >so that they can be run anywhere. [floating-point ones are fine, too, >but there already exist lots of those, whereas there's a sad lack of >integer ones.] >Unfortunately, saying that a machine "smokes" doesn't help as much! > >To summarize: statements about performance are either completely meaningless, >or they're actually supposed to tell something about how computers >behave. If they're the latter, you should be able to test them. >-- We had a chance to use a Sun-4 for several months before we actually purchased the machine. We ran the standard benchmarks (e.g., drystone and whetstone) and several of our in-house applications. From this our results show us that the Sun-4 is about 8 VAX 11/780 MIPS on some benchmarks and as high as 10 VAX MIPS on others. Our VLSI group has been running their design software and they have found that the Sun 4 is almost three times faster than a Sun 3/260, or around 10 MIPS, for one of their design packages, which uses primarily integer arithmetic. On one of my group's graphics applications which does 3-D rotation (which is fairly floatin point intensive) the Sun-4 is over 4 times the speed of a Sun 3/180 with a floating point accelerator board. The VLSI group has not run HSPICE on the Sun 4 yet, but if and when they do, I will post the results. Unfortunately all the code for the applications I have mentioned is proprietary and cannot be distributed. > >Also, it would help to specify which Motorola implementation it was much >faster than: a recent Computerworld article fell into the trap of >saying the Sun-4 was exceeding expectations, because it looked 3-5X faster >(than the Sun-3), more even than the claimed 2.5X. If you consider >2-mips 3/100s and 4-mips 3/200s, you can see what happened. > Well, I guess that I fell into the same "trap" as Computerworld. My remarks regarding the SPARC vs. the 680x0 are relative to the Sun 3 computer systems. My understanding is that the Sun 3 family does a fairly good job of utilizing the 68020. I will state once again, that I have really enjoyed the discussion of SPARC vs. MIPS. This discussion has been an example of comp.arch at its best. There is no question that solid benchmark data is needed to evaluate various architectural approaches. However there are many factors that go into making a successful commercial computer system. One of these is system price. I do not think that Sun is trying to build the fastest computer in its class, but I do think that they are trying to build the computer with the best system price per MIP. Ian L. Kaplan ESL, Advanced Technology Systems M/S 302 495 Java Dr. P.O. Box 3510 Sunnyvale, CA 94088-3510 decvax!decwrl!\ sdcsvax!seismo!- ames!esl!ian ucbcad!ucbvax!/ / ihnp4!lll-lcc!