[comp.sys.next] poor Mathematica performance

mdixon@thelonius.PARC.xerox.com (Mike Dixon) (07/06/89)

i tried a simple root-finding benchmark and got 40s for my NeXT vs.
30s on a mac IIx.  given that the mac is running the same hardware
slower, this is presumably a combination of (a) higher OS overhead,
and (b) better performance-tuning in the mac version.  on the other
hand, the OS overhead shouldn't be *that* high (none of the other
processes were compute bound, and there's 16MB of memory; i ran
the test several times and got quite consistent timings).  and i
don't understand why the code in question (kernel) isn't identical
between the two machines (what's the point of separating kernel &
front end if you don't share the kernel code??).  so what's happening?