Re: DEC/Intel deal and Alpha future...

From: Bill Broadley (bill@math.UCDavis.edu)
Date: Sat Nov 08 1997 - 14:57:28 CST


In article <6424p7$n2f$1@murrow.corp.sgi.com> you wrote:
: In article <3463E2E4.61FA@EasyInternet.net>,
: --------------------------------------------------------------
: DEC ~1.05 21164 4100 500 4 MB
: SGI 1.0 R10000 Origin 195 4 MB
: HP ~0.8 PA-8000 K-460 180 1+1 MB
: Sun ~0.7 Ultra2 UE5002 250 2(?) MB
: IBM ~0.7 P2SC SP 120 ???
: Intel ~0.3 P6 various 200 512 kB ?
: --------------------------------------------------------------
: I apologize in advance for any minor errors -- I am typing this
: from memory at home on a Saturday morning....

: Very little data is available from the 625 MHz Alphas, the 236 MHz
: PA-8200's,

I have one on order (8200). Digital is shipping 533's, and specbench
already has results on the 4100/600. (29 ish specfp95)

> the 300 MHz Ultra2, or the 300 MHz PII --- but it is clear

I had to cheat a little bit to get good timings, I put a for i=1 to 10
around each loop, and then ran the entire stream benchmark 10 times
and took the best. This was because I only had 128 mb ram. The
below is on 3 million numbers (68.7 mb ram)

Function Rate (MB/s) RMS time Min time Max time
Copy: 290.9095 0.1667 0.1650 0.1680
Scale: 280.7013 0.1722 0.1710 0.1730
Add: 341.2321 0.2126 0.2110 0.2130
Triad: 349.5147 0.2081 0.2060 0.2090

I'd be happy to run any benchmarks, in fact I rewrote stream in
java applet with a mysql backend for results:

Array size=1398101 10.66MB Per array
Function Rate (MB/s) RMS time Min time Max time Error
Copy= 143.3 156 156 157 0.6369%
Scale= 127.8 175 175 176 0.5681%
Add= 122.9 273 273 274 0.3649%
Triad= 116.1 289 289 290 0.3448%

Not bad, the sun jit's about 50% as fast as the maximally optimized
c version.
 
: from the SPEC results that we can expect relatively small changes in
: performance here, and no change in the rankings. I *do* have
: data for faster R10000's, but since we have not announced availability
: yet....

Oh speaking of which SGI won the bid as you probably know
(the NPACI project at UCDavis).

: Of course, it seems likely that the 21264 will change the picture
: for a while -- but *historically* the performance advantage of
: Alpha has been minor and entirely over-hyped.

While true, the price performance on the low end has become amazing.
i.e. 533 Mhz alpha systems for $1800 (not including monitor).

: "Computer performance is more than the cpu clock frequency"
: "Computer performance is more than the cpu clock frequency"P
: "Computer performance is more than the cpu clock frequency"

*chuckle*, yes I expect our 236 Mhz HP to be the fastest
machine we have while being slower clocked then all the
alphas, the pc's, and the suns.

-- 
Bill Broadley           Bill@math.ucdavis.edu               UCD Math Sys-Admin
Linux is great.         http://math.ucdavis.edu/~bill                   PGP-ok



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