mash@mips.UUCP (John Mashey) (07/07/87)
I've been intrigued by Amdahl's recent recuriting ads that say they
build a UNIX kernel in 3 minutes. Can anybody from Amdahl say:
1) what model this is on?
2) is 3 minutes CPU time, or real time, and what's the other number?
3) is this optimized or unoptimized?
For comparison:
UNIX kernel make from scratch times: 4.3BSD+NFS, MIPS M/1000:
239.7u 74.5s 12:39 41% 99+231k 6739+6986io 3167pf unoptimized
492.6u 100.3s 18:53 52% 174+313k 8591+8880io 3901pf optimized -O2
MIPS M/800's are a little slower, take about 15 minutes real, and 6 minutes
total CPU time.
NOTE: this benchmark is NOT necessarily a good test of anything in particular,
but it is of more than passing interest to people who do kernels!
[I'm hunting numbers from other machines for next Performance Brief.
Mail to me and I'll summarize to the net.]
--
-john mashey DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
UUCP: {decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!mips!mash OR mash@mips.com
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USPS: MIPS Computer Systems, 930 E. Arques, Sunnyvale, CA 94086yoram@cheshire.columbia.edu (Yoram Eisenstadter) (07/08/87)
In article <502@winchester.UUCP> mash@mips.UUCP (John Mashey) writes: >I've been intrigued by Amdahl's recent recruiting ads that say they >build a UNIX kernel in 3 minutes. Can anybody from Amdahl say: >1) what model this is on? >2) is 3 minutes CPU time, or real time, and what's the other number? >3) is this optimized or unoptimized? > >For comparison: >UNIX kernel make from scratch times: 4.3BSD+NFS, MIPS M/1000: >239.7u 74.5s 12:39 41% 99+231k 6739+6986io 3167pf unoptimized >492.6u 100.3s 18:53 52% 174+313k 8591+8880io 3901pf optimized -O2 I'm not from Amdahl, but here goes anyway... Since C compiles do a great deal of I/O (reading in source and .h files, writing out temp files, reading in temp files, writing out object files) it seems to me that any benchmark of a kernel-make would be heavily dependent on the kind of disk drives attached to the processor. If Amdahl's figures come from a system that's similar to current large IBM mainframes (I don't know much about Amdahl's products, except that they're 370-architecture compatible), they would typically have fast disk drives with large, expensive controllers hooked up via fast block-multiplexor channels. I doubt that MIPS boxes come with such I/O devices. (Amdahl may even have CPUs which are faster than MIPS's; who knows? :-) ) By the way, note that John's benchmarks show that the CPU is idle about half the time, probably waiting for disk reads to complete. Also, assuming Amdahl's numbers represent wall-clock time (and their kernel is as big as 4.3BSD+NFS), they are only 4 to 6 times faster than John's numbers. The fact that the largest conventional mainframe is 4 to 6 times faster than a small RISC processor (is the MIPS a single-chip CPU? single board?) doesn't really surprise me very much. Cheers..Yoram Yoram Eisenstadter | Arpanet: yoram@cs.columbia.edu Columbia University | Usenet: seismo!columbia!cs!yoram Dept. of Computer Science | Bitnet: yoram%cs.columbia.edu@WISCVM New York, NY 10027 | Phone: (212) 280-8180
haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU.ucsc.edu (99700000) (07/08/87)
In article <502@winchester.UUCP> mash@mips.UUCP (John Mashey) writes: >I've been intrigued by Amdahl's recent recuriting ads that say they >build a UNIX kernel in 3 minutes. Can anybody from Amdahl say: I haven't seen the ads, but it has bothered me for years that we could compile the 'kernel' of the Burroughs 5500 MCP from scratch in about 20 minutes (from scratch being the only way you could compile it), yet on hardware 20 years younger it takes hours to compile a Unix kernel of about the same size. haynes@ucscc.ucsc.edu haynes@ucscc.bitnet ..ucbvax!ucscc!haynes
dwc@homxc.UUCP (07/09/87)
In article <502@winchester.UUCP>, mash@mips.UUCP (John Mashey) writes: > I've been intrigued by Amdahl's recent recuriting ads that say they > build a UNIX kernel in 3 minutes. Can anybody from Amdahl say: > 1) what model this is on? > 2) is 3 minutes CPU time, or real time, and what's the other number? > 3) is this optimized or unoptimized? > > For comparison: > UNIX kernel make from scratch times: 4.3BSD+NFS, MIPS M/1000: > 239.7u 74.5s 12:39 41% 99+231k 6739+6986io 3167pf unoptimized > 492.6u 100.3s 18:53 52% 174+313k 8591+8880io 3901pf optimized -O2 > > MIPS M/800's are a little slower, take about 15 minutes real, and 6 minutes > total CPU time. > > NOTE: this benchmark is NOT necessarily a good test of anything in particular, > but it is of more than passing interest to people who do kernels! > > [I'm hunting numbers from other machines for next Performance Brief. i don't know about kernel builds but i once ported a cross compiler enviroment in order to run a benchmark on an amdahl and the make went so fast that i thought that i was 'cat'ting the makefile! danny chen {ihnp4|attunix}!homxc!dwc
pdg@ihdev.UUCP (07/09/87)
In article <502@winchester.UUCP> mash@mips.UUCP (John Mashey) writes: >I've been intrigued by Amdahl's recent recuriting ads that say they >build a UNIX kernel in 3 minutes. Can anybody from Amdahl say: >1) what model this is on? >2) is 3 minutes CPU time, or real time, and what's the other number? >3) is this optimized or unoptimized? I must say I believe it. On one of our systems: uts ihlpj 5.2.5 5 5890 (ie an amdahl 5890 running Unix 5.2.5) I can build GNU emacs from scratch in less than a minute. I would then guess that that is real time. Also (as a guess) I would say optimized as I would suppose they are running (as I was) the native mode compiler. Check out the Dhrystones for these beasties. Quite impressive and they do live up to it. -- Paul Guthrie "Another day, another Jaguar" ihnp4!ihdev!pdg -- Pat Sajak