From: farine@decus.ch
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: Power-up for AGA Machines! rumour.
Date: 18 Dec 92 12:37:59 CET
Organization: DECUS (Switzerland)

In article <BzCyJx.D0L@fc.hp.com>, koren@fc.hp.com (Steve Koren) writes:
> Neal Wickham (nwickham@nyx.cs.du.edu) wrote:
> 
>> BTW... I talked to some DEC sales people once who told me that the new
>> Alphas were supposed to do about 2000 specmarks.  A 486 is around 10 
>> specmarks. ...just to give some of the less technical people here an idea.
> 
> I very much doubt a single Alpha chip is anywhere even remotely close to
> 2000 specmarks.  Today's RISC CPU's tend to get somewhere between 0.5
> and 1.8 specmarks per MHz.  Here are the specmark ratings for some
> today's common RISC machines based on tests by an independent test
> agency.  Also I threw 486 info in just for comparison.  Sorry, I don't
> have any 68040 info.  If I were to guess, I'd say a 68040/33 MHz would
> be something between 15 and 20 specmarks, but I could be way off base on
> that.  Also, some of these machines listed below are more than a year
> old now.
> 
>     CPU                    Speed      Specmarks   Specmarks/MHz
>     ------------------------------------------------------------
>     HP 9000/750            66 MHz     77          1.16
>     HP 9000/730            66 MHz     74          1.12
>     SGI Indigo R4000       50 MHz     69          1.38
>     IBM RS/6000            42 MHz     69          1.64 (best spec/MHz)
>     486/66                 66 MHz     25          0.38 (worst spec/MHz)
>     DECstation 5000/240    40 MHz     24          0.60
>     486/50                 50 MHz     22          0.44
>     SGI Indigo R3000       33 MHz     20          0.61
>     Sun Sparc 2            40 MHz     19          0.47
>     486/33                 33 MHz     14          0.42
>     486/25                 25 MHz     10          0.40
> 
      DEC 10000-610 AXP     200 MHz    184.14       0.92
      DEC 7000-610 AXP      182 MHz    167.43       0.92
      DEC 4000-610 AXP      160 MHz    136.23       0.85
      DEC 3000-500 AXP      150 MHz    121.50       0.81
      DEC 3000-400 AXP      133 MHz    108.14       0.81

These are the SPECmark89 as given by DEC for the current line of Alpha based
computers. The 10000-610 can have up to 6 processors (above figure is for 
1 processor).

> I could perhaps believe that a new Alpha machine could get close to 200
> Specmarks (ie, 10X less than your number).  There are a number of other
> announced machines now from HP, Dec, and IBM which make the above
> numbers (77 specmarks) look slow.  But I cannot believe 2000 specmarks.
> Given what seems to be state of the art today, 2000 specmarks would
> require either a 1200 MHz CPU, which is clearly not possible, or
> something like 20 parallel instruction execution units on one chip,
> which I also can't see happening just due to technology limitations.
> 
> I'd believe 200, but not 2000.  Still, 200 is very, very fast.  It'll
> make your 68040 seem like an 8086 in comparison :-)
> 
>   - steve
-- 
Jean-Pierre Farine
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