Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks: RS6000 v. SS-1+

[J. Eric Townsend]

In article <1991Jan31.152640.12173 at rice.edu> irv at masc35.rice.edu (Irvin Lustig) writes:
>Our Fortran application screams on an RS6000 530.  It is about 6 to 7
>times faster than on a Sparcstation 1+.  

Comparing a 530 to a 1+ is a bit of a biased comparison, IMHO.  Try a 320
to a 1+, perhaps.

Our 320's are 3-5X faster than our 1's on floating, and about 1/3 faster
on integer only character manipulation.  Not bad, since the people who bought
the 320's wanted to run fortran array crunchers fast and for little bucks.

>This is because the Sun Fortran compiler had some bugs in it. 

What an understatement.  If all you do is run fortran code, *don't buy
a sun*, or at least buy somebody else's fortran compiler.  SMI's fortran
bites pretty hard.

On the other hand, I've never had to port a single C-based app that I wanted
to use on the Sun. :-)


--
J. Eric Townsend - jet at uh.edu - bitnet: jet at UHOU - vox: (713) 749-2120
"It is the cunning of form to veil itself continually in the evidence
of content.  It is the cunning of the code to veil itself and to produce
itself in the obviousness of value." -- Baudrillard