salc@aristotle.shearson.com (Sal Cataudella) (04/04/91)
Okay folks, has anybody out there heard anything about a 40 MHZ '040 upgrade? Recent benchmarks in NeXTWorld suggest that a 40 MHZ 68040 would beat a 40 MHZ SPARC chip (the one used in the SPARCstation II).... Perhaps those of us who have purchased the 25 MHZ '040 upgrade should consider buying high speed memory to be prepared for the next *real* upgrade!! :) So how about it folks? Any unconfirmed reports that anybody wishes to share? --Sal -- Sal Cataudella Internet: salc@alfred.shearson.com UUCP: ...!uunet!slcpi!alfred!salc (212) 464-3871
39clocks@violet.berkeley.edu (Peter Marinac) (04/04/91)
In article <SALC.91Apr3161624@aristotle.shearson.com> salc@alfred.shearson.com writes: > >Okay folks, has anybody out there heard anything about >a 40 MHZ '040 upgrade? Recent benchmarks in NeXTWorld >suggest that a 40 MHZ 68040 would beat a 40 MHZ SPARC >chip (the one used in the SPARCstation II).... > Haven't heard, but I'm also not too sure about the relative performance of the 040 and the SPARC. If you look at the benchmarks in the "Station to Station" article in Vol 2 of NeXTWORLD, and assume, all other things being equal, that a 40Mhz chip is 160% the speed of a 25Mhz chip, the benchmarks would look something like this: 040-25 040-40 Sparc-station 2 ------ ------ ------ Sieve(1000) 15.6 9.8 7.3 seconds Sort(2000) 9.5 5.9 4.9 Matrix(50) 16.4 10.3 5.8 Float(10000) 6.4 4.0 3.4 Savage(20000) 24.7 15.3 5.6 Dhrystone2 22,727 36,363 34,884 # So, on the Dhrystone2 there is about a 5% speed advantage. (sure hope I did the math correctly) But these numbers really don't mean anything at all. What matters is whether or not you are going to be more productive on one machine vs. the other. If you have already settled on a NeXT, hell, the speed improvement of stepping up to 40Mhz processor would be something to talk about in and of itself. Unfortunately, the 40Mhz processor is likely to cost a bit more than the 25Mhz, and so the upgrade mother card, (the processors aren't exactly socketed), to achieve a little over 1-1/2 times speed improvement, will cost more than the 030->040 upgrade, which resulted in a 3x speed improvement; or so they say. Anybody else notice that Motorroller touts the 040 as a 20MIP processor in its adds but the NeXT and joint-NeXT adds call it a 15MIPper? > >So how about it folks? Any unconfirmed reports that >anybody wishes to share? > Well, someone recently mentioned, or rather predicted, that NeXT would release a four 040 processor card to exploit the multiprocessing capabilities of the Mach OS, sometime this fall. And, and, and at the Unix Challenge conference, to be held April 9-12 in Boston, Joseph Boykin will be talking about Mach "a new operating system targeted for distributed and multiprocessor environments." Mr Boykin's company is porting Mach to the "1000 MIPS Gigamax symmetric shared memory multiprocessor." I guess that is how they say "fast". I wonder if they are interested in running NeXTStep on that machine. ==:-)