From: kanefsky@halcyon.com (Steve Kanefsky)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Daystar Powercache (need info...)
Date: 13 Sep 92 03:08:22 GMT
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service

In article <1992Sep10.165937.22578@nwnexus.WA.COM> I wrote: writes:
>
>As soon as I've got my PowerCache installed, I'll test it out and fill in
>the net.  Naturally I'll post those all-important Speedometer numbers :-)

OK, I've had the PowerCache for about 24 hours now (it took an extra day
because MacWarehouse apparently calls back to verify credit-card
purchases of this amount. Since I ordered late on Wednesday they didn't
call back until Thursday and I didn't get the package 'till Friday.
Keep that in mind if you're ordering something expensive from
MacWarehouse).

Not to keep anybody in suspense, the PowerCache improves my LC II's
performance incredibly!  Most things are literally three times faster.
The only area of performance which isn't increased substantially is disk
throughput (and I have a relatively slow Quantum 80MB LPS drive).
Nevertheless, even disk intensive tasks like launching a big application
with a big data file are much faster (launching Excel 4.0, for example is
at least twice as fast -- even moreso when it's launched with a big set
of complex linked spreadsheets.)

Programs that are intended to run at a constant speed (mostly games) are
running a whole lot more smoothly now.  Solarian, for example -- which
used to get "bogged down" in the later rounds -- doesn't slow down at all
now no matter how much action is occuring on-screen.  Spectre is also
much easier to play now.  It used to be difficult to aim on the higher
levels (level 20 or so) when there were a lot of tanks firing at you
because one tap of the key would move you 10 degrees or so.  Now you can
aim much more precisely and fire more rapidly and everything seems much
smoother (I could even swear that the rendering of the 3D scenes was
more realistic).  I haven't decided yet whether this makes games easier
or harder to play.  It certainly makes them more fun to play.  I just
tend to get more reckless (just as one tends to get more reckless when
driving a high-performance car than an old jalopy).

CPU intensive programs really fly now!  I use DeHQX a lot to translate
..hqx files to Mac files, and it used to be annoyingly slow.  Now it
really flies!  Compression programs are much much faster now too.  

You may recall from my last article that I decided not to get the FPU
with my 50mhz PowerCache, although I intend to upgrade to the 33mhz
68040 PowerCache with built-in FPU when it comes out.  The only regret I 
have so far is that I'd like to see how well my LC II + PowerCache would 
perform on number-crunching tasks like ray-tracing.  I tried to run 
Persistence of Vision and got an error dialog saying that the program 
wouldn't run without an FPU, after which the machine bombed.  That's the 
only bomb I've gotten so far with the PowerCache, and I've got lots of 
extensions (all the Now Utilities plus 6 or 7 other ones).  I've also run 
lots of programs, even some old games from '88 or so, and everything that 
ran before still runs with the PowerCache.  I'm not sure if the POV crash
would have happened on my LC II without the PowerCache or not.  After
the POV crash, I got a copy of SoftwareFPU and tried to do some
rendering with that.  Even the 50mhz '030 with Software FPU is a far cry
from a 16mhz '030 with 16mhz FPU.  I had the Daystar PowerMath LC before
I got the PowerCache, and POV was a lot faster with the real FPU.  

I wish there was a way in software to completely disable the PowerCache,
so I could easily switch back and forth and give lots of concrete
numbers, but the only thing you can do with software is disable the 32K
RAM cache.  I did, however, have Speedometer 3.1 results from my plain
LC II and of course I have results with the PowerCache installed.  My
setup is a Mac LC II with 4MB RAM, 80MB Quantum LPS hard disk, 512K
VRAM, 13" Apple Hi-Res RGB monitor (set to 1-bit video before running the
tests).  I rebooted with all extensions, startup items, and virtual
memory off in each case, except that I needed the DayStar PowerCentral
extension to enable the cache for the tests with the PowerCache.
I've included the raw results here for each setup as well as the
percentage improvement in each test ((B-A)/A * 100, where B is with
PowerCache and A is without).

I'd really appreciate it if someone could post or email to me some
Speedometer readings on IIfx's and/or Quadra 700's.  I'd be interested 
to see how an accelerated LC II compares to those machines. 

Remember that my these benchmarks are with no FPU.  Steve Tuttle from 
DayStar, in a note posted on sumex.stanford.edu 
(info-mac/report/daystar-powercache.txt), listed the following Speedometer
figures for an LC with 50mhz PowerCache w/ FPU:

P.R. Rating:    11.88
Bench Avg:      20.82
FPU Avg:         4.05
Color Avg:       2.30


Here are my figures for the LC II with and without 50mhz PowerCache (no
FPU in either case) Keep in mind that 0% faster would mean no
improvement, 100% faster means twice as fast, 200% faster means three
times as fast, etc:

Benchmark       w/o PC  w/ PC   %faster
-----------------------------------------
CPU             4.03    13.11   225%
Graf            4.80    10.52   119%
Disk            1.65    1.95     18%
Math            5.63    17.35   208%
P.R. Rating     3.95    10.52   166%
 
KWhet           6.67    18.55   178%
Dhry            2.64    10.44   295%
Towers          2.57    8.32    224%
Quicksort       3.26    10.73   229%
Bubble Sort     4.66    14.21   205%
Queens          4.36    11.74   169%
Puzzle          4.70    16.56   252%
Permute         3.69    7.43    101%
Fast Fourier    4.53    13.73   203%
F.P. Matrix     4.43    12.85   190%
Int. Matrix     3.94    15.12   284%
Sieve           4.87    15.07   209%
Bench. Ave.     4.19    12.90   208%

Monochrome      1.15    2.63    129%
2 Bit           1.23    2.49    102%
4 Bit           1.28    2.17     70%
8 Bit           1.28    1.76     38%
Color Ave.      1.23    2.26     84%
 

--
Steve Kanefsky