From: muno@aem.umn.edu (Ray Muno)
Subject: Re: SPECMARKS for SS10?
Organization: University of Minnesota
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 12:58:43 GMT

hudgens@SCRI.FSU.EDU (Jim Hudgens) writes:


>A researcher here has expressed interest in getting a SS10.  I 
>grabbed  a couple of brochures the sun salesperson gave me, and 
>gave it to him, but he noticed that nowhere in the brochure is
>any mention of the actual performance of the SS10, for any model.
>Hmmm...   

>I managed to dig up DECstation5000 numbers from a file on
>gatekeeper.dec.com, as well as find an article posted from someone at
>ibm.com to comp.unix.aix giving RS6000 spec numbers, but none from
>sun.  I checked ftp.uu.net, and several other places (sun.com, which
>doesn't have an ftp server).  Found bunches of interesting
>papers, but no benchmarks.   I noticed that the SPEC numbers
>are posted semi-regularly for IBM products to comp.unix.aix; 
>that would be nice here, too.

>So, anyone have the latest numbers for the sun line of products?
>Anyone know of a recent article I could look at doing a broad 
>comparison of workstations?  Online tech-report?  Anything
>involving SPECmarks?

Here is a little excerpt from comp.sys.sgi dated from about a month ago:

==========================================================================
SPECmark used to be a single figure (now called Spec89) that was meant to more  accuractely characterize the performance of a complete system than MIPS. As  
with MIPS, the figure is relative to a VAX 11/780 (= 1 SPECmark).

It is based on a range of benchmarks meant to be characteristic of a wide range  
of real workloads, and is based on runs of real programs (not synthetic or toy  benchmarks). Recently, some manufacturers found a "trick" optimization that  
sped up one of the benchmarks so much that the figure became meaningless, so  
that specific program was deleted and the numbers were split into integer and  
floating point (SPECint92 and SPECfp92). Take care not to compare Spec89 and  
Spec92 numbers - some manufacturers sitll quote SPECmark meaning Spec89.

For more discussion of this see comp.benchmarks.

Here are some figures that were posted to comp.benchmarks (I added in R4000  
Indigo figures as posted to this group):

System           clock   cache   SPECint92   SPECfp92
------           -----   -----   ---------   --------
Sun SS-10/30       36    0+36k      44.2       52.9
Sun SS-10/41       40    1M+36k     52.6       64.7
Sun SS-2           40    0+64k      21.8       22.8
MIPS Magnum      50/100  0+16k      36.8       40.0
SGI R4000 Indigo 50/100  1M+16k     57         61
SGI Crimson      50/100  1M+16k     61.7       63.4
HP 710             50    0+96k      31.6       47.6
HP 750             66    0+512k     48.1       75.0
IBM 340            33    0+40k      27.7       51.9
IBM 560            50    0+72k      42.0       85.6
Intel Xpress (486) 50    256k+8k    30.1       14.0
--
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 Ray Muno					 Internet:  muno@aem.umn.edu
 University of Minnesota
 Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.misc,comp.sys.sun.wanted