From: ewright@convex.com (Edward V. Wright)
Subject: Re: Macs cost too much (NOT!)
Organization: Engineering, CONVEX Computer Corp., Richardson, Tx., USA
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 17:44:07 GMT
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by a user at CONVEX Computer
              Corp. The opinions expressed are those of the user and
              not necessarily those of CONVEX.

In <92211.150235ASI509@DJUKFA11.BITNET> ASI509@DJUKFA11.BITNET writes:

>Sorry, but comparing only cost or only speed is absolute nonsense. I can
>compare the speed of equally priced machines or the cost of equally powered
>machines, 

Or you can compare the speed of a much more expensive machine in order
to stack the deck in your favor.  Which is what you did.


>I don`t need a "full blown" 486 for this. In one of the latest MacWorld issues
>the average price for a IIsi w 14" (13"?) color monitor was about $3000 with
>5MB RAM and 105MB harddisk. Thats about DM4500 but thats surely not the price
>in Germany. Here you have to add a considerable NON-US-CUSTOMER penalty.
>For a 33MHz 486, 4MB RAM, 106MB harddisk, 14" color monitor, DOS and Win3.1

Sigh.  How many times must we go through this?  That 14" monitor is 
not even close to being comparable to Apple's RGB Tritron monitor.
If you wanted to use a crappy VGA on the Mac instead, you could
knock off several hundred dollars.  Getting a good (SCSI) hard
disk on the PC will add a couple hundred dollars more. Yes, you
can buy a cheap 486 and get just what you pay for....   

Oh, did I mention Hypercard, Resedit, and all the other software
Apple gives you free?  Or how much you'd pay to get the equivalent
software (Toolbook, Whitewater Resource Toolkit, etc.) for the PC?


>The FIRTS benchmark I referred to in my    post was a Dhrystone benchmark
>compiled with THINK C 4.05 on the Mac IIsi and GCC 2.1 running under OS/2 2.0

Obviously fair comparison.  You used an old version of the Think C
compiler, without the code optimizer.  I hop you also remembered to
turn the floating-point code generation off.  

>on a 33MHz 386 (NOT 486 that will  be another factor 2 to 2.5). The results:

>                  Mac IIsi             386
>Dhrystones/s      5600                17400

>Now you can discuss the meaningfullness or lack thereof of this kind of bench-
>mark, but since this test comes from the UNIX (or mainframe ?) world and most
>of the machines mentioned in the source code were 680x0 based workstations I
>seriously doubt it is highly optimized for the PC. Also it doesn`t include
>floating point benchmarks.

No one in the UNIX or mainframe world takes the dhrystone benchmark
seriously anymore.  This is one of the programs, in fact, that I've 
gotten to run slower on the CONVEX than on the Macintosh, which shows
you how misleading these synthetic benchmarks are.

And since you didn't answer my question about whether you bothered 
to install the FPU in the IIsi before running the benchmark, I'll
assume the answer is either "no" or "I don't know what that is." 


>The SECOND "benchmark" I ran was using Word 4.0 on the Mac and WinWord 1.1 on
>the same PC with Win3.0 (not the fastest GUI of all times). The PC was equipped
>with a ET3000 VGA board which is definitely not the fastest under the SUN :-)
>and in fact already out of production. Both Word versions are functionally
>equivalent and --- you might guess it --- the PC won this subjective
>"benchmark" hands down. It is _my_ Mac and _my_ PC so why should I be that much
>biased ?.

Oh, let's see... why would Microsoft write a word processor that runs 
faster under Windows than it does on the Mac...?   Why would Microsoft 
write a word processor that runs faster under Windows than it does on
a Mac...?  Why would Microsoft...
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc