gsk@khaki.asd.sgi.com (George S. Kong) (06/10/90)
can anyone out there help me compare a mac to a 386 clone w.r.t. floating point performance in fortran? i have a friend who's a grad student in physics and would like to buy a machine to run simulations written in fortran. because of the student discounts available to him, he can purchase a mac se/30 or a similarly-configured 33 Mhz 386 clone with a 387 math coprocessor for roughly the same price. i have two sets of questions: 1) what fortran compilers are available for these two machines at fairly low cost? how do they perform on the above-mentioned hardware? 2) the 33MHz 386 machine is closest to the se/30 in price, but slower ones are available. some of these models are available with and without caches. does presence or absence of a cache affect math coprocessor performance the same way it affects performance of other cpu operations? *** SINCE I DON'T READ THESE TWO NEWS GROUPS, PLEASE MAIL REPLIES *** DIRECTLY TO ME, AND I'LL SUMMARIZE. thanks. George S. Kong, Silicon Graphics, Inc., (415)962-3281 gsk@sgi.com ...{decwrl,allegra,adobe,ucbvax,pyramid,ames}!sgi!gsk