System Differences

[James R. Seamans]

I'm not really sure how to begin this thread of discussion, but I'll try
anything twice. I'll try to kept it short.

Here at the National Library of Medicine, we have a large Sun shop with a
diversity of systems. In October of 1990, a requirement for five new Sparc
systems was identified and analysis of the missions for these systems was
started.

Cut through the **** 

Two Sparc vendors were identified who could supply the needed hardware. Of
course one was Sun Microsystems and the other was Solbourne Computer.
Solbourne provided us a S4000 system to test our software and generally
see the box. Sun had provided a Sparc 2 system which was in the building
but we did not know it, since it was in another division. I later took our
executable and related files to the local Sun office to be tested.

System Architecture:

Solbourne S4000
Sparc Panasonic MN10501 25.5 MIPS, 1.7 MFLOPS, 12 SPECmarks
	16 MByte of memory 207 MB disk; running X window system.

Sun Sparc 2 4/75
Sun Sparc 2      28.5 MIPS, 4.2 MFLOPS, 21 SPECmarks
	16 MByte of memory 207 MB disk; running Openwindow system.

The software was a locally developed correlation program for image
processing. It has a significant amount of floating point operations and
was originally developed on a Sun 4/260. The program was compiled without
any optimization on the Sun 4/260 and the executable was run on each
system without any modifications.

Here are the timings for the different systems:

	Sun 4/260	3 hr 28 min
	Sun 4/75	1 hr 6 min
	S4000		1 hr 8 min

Question #1: 

If the Sun 4/75 has significantly better floating point operation than the
S4000, how come it only showed a 2 minute better time?

When the Systems Engineer from Sun saw the timing, he immediately wanted
and got a re-compile using the latest Sun un-bundled C compiler. He
utilized several optimizations to re-compile the program.

	re-running on:

		Sun 4/470	35 mins	(? 22 MIPS system )
		Sun 4/75	30 mins

Now, these were the timings I was expecting from the Sparc 2.

Question #2: 

Does this mean that the specifications Sun quotes is based on the
un-bundled C compiler and gives a false impression of the Sparc 2 system
speed?

Comparing comparable systems from both:

	16 Mb mem, 19"Color, 207M disk ( you know a standard box)
	Solbourne is $4000 less

Now,	Jump to the system we want to purchase:

	Solbourne 19" 24bit color 1280 x 1024
	Sun 21" 24bit color 1280 x 1024
	16 Mb memory
	rest of the system about the same

	At current pricing, Solbourne is $21,500 less than Sun.

Question #3 ....:

Who is Sun kidding?  Is the 2 extra inches worth $21500?  Have I missed
some hidden attribute of the Sun machine?  What is going on at Sun?  Are
they changing their name to IBM?

Caveat: No I have not had a chance to re-run on the Solbourne with an
un-bundled compiler but it WILL happen.

Jim Seamans,	Senior Computer Scientist
seamans at seaimage.nlm.nih.gov	(130.14.1.73)