CGWILLMERS@vax.swansea.ac.uk (03/23/90)
Fellow netters,
I saw an ad in BYTE latest issue for an i860 board for PC's
claiming not a flop less than 66 MFLOPS "peak performance".
Even dividing this figure by two, as I normally do with
manufacturers claims, it's still a lot of power.
I have some questions...
Is that possible ?
Has anyone run any kind of real world application on
this chip, to assess actual performance ?
Seeing that the board was advertised for 12.000 pounds, which
doesn't really buy a lot T800 these days, haven't we T' users just
lost our favourite selling point, price/ performance ?
Aren't transputers over-priced ?
I know some of this issues were raised before, but I considered
they deserve some more attention now that the competition hit
the market.
R. B. Willmersdorf
Dep. Civil Engineering
U. C. Swansea
Wales
cgwillmers@uk.ac.swan.vaxdow@heinrich.ig.com (Christopher Dow) (03/26/90)
> > Fellow netters, > > I saw an ad in BYTE latest issue for an i860 board for PC's > claiming not a flop less than 66 MFLOPS "peak performance". > Is that possible ? > Has anyone run any kind of real world application on > this chip, to assess actual performance ? If you are reffering to Mercury Systems or Sky computer, then yes, I do beleive it is possible. We currently have a tape at Mercury and they are going to send back a few data points on how our software works with their board. I'll post some of the results. +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Chris Dow | IntelliGenetics | | Software Engineer | 700 East El Camino Real | | "My opinions are mine not theirs--->" | Mountain View, Ca. 94040 | | AisA | (415) 962-7320 | | | dow@presto.ig.com | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
torki@floenz1.UUCP (Torsten Kirschner) (03/28/90)
Hi, In article <27122.9003231448@prg.oxford.ac.uk> CGWILLMERS@vax.swansea.ac.uk writes: } I saw an ad in BYTE latest issue for an i860 board for PC's } claiming not a flop less than 66 MFLOPS "peak performance". } I have some questions... } Is that possible ? Technically spoken: Yes. This and similar figures are derived from a simple calculation: the i860 is a RISC chip, therefore it does execute 1 instruction per machine cylce; using a clock rate of 40 MHz and 2 seperate arithmetic units this compiles to 80 MFLOPS. (66 MFLOPS is only a slightly more realistic approach.) Personally I think that this high performance can only be used and maintained using highly parallised vectorized code that applies the built-in pipeline- features which make this troughput possible. This requires good compilers (Trace, for instance) and good libraries, plus the code's ability of being parallised in this way at all. } Has anyone run any kind of real world application on } this chip, to assess actual performance ? I dought that there is anybody who _actually_ uses this chip, since it is not available in any quantities here nore do I know where. Therefore I am just as interested as You in the answer to Your question. } Seeing that the board was advertised for 12.000 pounds, which } doesn't really buy a lot T800 these days, haven't we T' users just } lost our favourite selling point, price/ performance ? Yes. (Although I must state in favour of T's that they _are_ available, which I dought about this i860-board.) } Aren't transputers over-priced ? Yes. } I know some of this issues were raised before, but I considered } they deserve some more attention now that the competition hit } the market. I mostly agree, but I am afraid of an endless contraversy when to buy one or ten Quadputers rather than one or two i860s and vice versa, since we all know that there are various applications which run better the more CPUs are invol- ved and others that don't. } R. B. Willmersdorf } Dep. Civil Engineering } cgwillmers@uk.ac.swan.vax mfg Torsten /*----------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | usenet : torki@floenz1.doit.sub.org oldnet : tork @floenz1.UUCP | | bitnet : EKNOF @ DM0MPF11 Max-Planck-Institute for Psychological Research| | mailnet : T.R. Kirschner, Schwanthalerstr. 83, D-8000 Muenchen 2, W.-Germany| |phonenet : {+49 | 0}89 5328834 between XMas and New Year: {+49 | 0}5206 3608| \----------------------------------------------------------------------------*/ Und irgendwo er, lachend, in einer weisz getuenchten Dachkammer, die fernen Finger zaertlich auf dem Deck, das Gesicht mit Freudentraenen ueberstroemt. W.G.