deh7g@newton.acc.Virginia.EDU (David E. Husk) (07/28/90)
We recently were able to try out a YARC NuSuper coprocessor
board installed in a Mac II. While we were at it we ran some
"real world" Fortran benchmarks -- programs which we consider
typical number-crunching applications. We concluded the YARC
is a seriously fast machine, as you can see from our results,
given below. Best of all, the YARC board is relatively
inexpensive.
The board comes in two flavors, one for Mac II's, one for
AT-compatibles using 80286, 80386, or 80486 CPU's. It runs
independent of the machine CPU, which means you can run a big
program on the board and still wordprocess or whatever without
the machine getting slowed down. It runs C or Fortran, but you
must use the compilers sold for the board. From what we
understand, the Fortran is evolving into something like VMS
Fortran, but doesn't cover some of the uncommon stuff yet.
The board we tried was a 25 Mhz board; YARC is now making a
30 Mhz board in its place. We cooked up some projected numbers
for the 30 Mhz in our benchmarks and concluded that even in
real*8 it will beat the new IBM 6000 SuperStation (which costs
MUCH more). In addition, we've heard rumors of a 40 Mhz board
yet to come.
We're impressed! We liked the board a lot, and we found
the people at YARC very responsive to our questions.
The board's suggested retail price was $4995 for the 25 Mhz
board. Incidentally, they also sell parallel processor boards.
To talk to these people:
Yarc Systems Corporation
27489 West Agoura Road
Agoura Hills, CA 91301
(818) 889-4388
We are just some physicists with low budgets and too many
numbers to crunch; we don't work for YARC and they didn't put us
up to this.
'Overlapd' is a triple integral coarse grid (real*4).
'IG3D' is a 8x8x8 Ising monte carlo model (real*8).
All the machines tested have a 32 bit word, except the IBM 6000
is 64 bits, and the CDC Cyber is 60 bits.
OVERLAPD.F IG3D.F
Computer Time Ratio Time Ratio
(sec) (sec)
IBM 3090 (mainframe) 152 0.72 1485 0.86
YARC NuSuper 30 [estimated] [177] 0.83 [1441] 0.83
YARC NuSuper 212 1.00 1729 1.00
IBM 6000 SuperStation 250 1.18 1537 0.89
DecStation 3100 model 38 328 1.55 4580 2.65
CDC Cyber 180/855 435 2.05 **** ****
Sun 4 SparcStation 479 2.26 **** ****
DEC MICROVAX III 493 2.33 **** ****
MAC II/FX 789 3.72 **** ****
MAC II 2671 12.6 **** ****
PDP 11/34 12660 59.7 **** ****
Husk@virginia.edu
Ejl6m@virginia.edu
phil@brahms.amd.com (Phil Ngai) (07/28/90)
In article <1990Jul27.212609.19980@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> deh7g@newton.acc.Virginia.EDU (David E. Husk) writes: | | We recently were able to try out a YARC NuSuper coprocessor |board installed in a Mac II. While we were at it we ran some |"real world" Fortran benchmarks -- programs which we consider |typical number-crunching applications. We concluded the YARC |is a seriously fast machine, as you can see from our results, |given below. Best of all, the YARC board is relatively |inexpensive. Sounds neat. What kind of processor does it use? :-) (by the way, you can expect further improvements, of a nature which will be revealed when appropriate, in the future) -- -- Phil Ngai, phil@amd.com {uunet,decwrl,ucbvax}!amdcad!phil We're saving water: we use disposable diapers.
clong@remus.rutgers.edu (Chris Long) (07/30/90)
Does the YARC speed up integer computation also or is it mainly a floating-point accelerator? By what factor would it speed up, say, a 25 MHz 486? -Chris
phil@brahms.amd.com (Phil Ngai) (07/31/90)
In article <Jul.29.20.28.01.1990.2046@remus.rutgers.edu> clong@remus.rutgers.edu (Chris Long) writes: | |Does the YARC speed up integer computation also or is it mainly a |floating-point accelerator? By what factor would it speed up, |say, a 25 MHz 486? 0%. The YARC is not an accelerator, it is a coprocessor that executes a completely different instruction set than the Intel family. You use the PC to do cross development, loading, and IO for the YARC processor. -- -- Phil Ngai, phil@amd.com {uunet,decwrl,ucbvax}!amdcad!phil We're saving water: we use disposable diapers.
bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) (07/31/90)
| clong@remus.rutgers.edu (Chris Long) writes: | |Does the YARC speed up integer computation also or is it mainly a | |floating-point accelerator? By what factor would it speed up, phil@brahms.amd.com (Phil Ngai) <1990Jul31.084543.10523@amd.com> : | 0%. The YARC is not an accelerator, it is a coprocessor that | executes a completely different instruction set than the Intel | family. You use the PC to do cross development, loading, and | IO for the YARC processor. Okay, so what does it coprocess? IEEE floats? Integers? Arrays? Neural nets? Or is it a general-purpose cpu?
phil@brahms.amd.com (Phil Ngai) (08/01/90)
In article <52701@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) writes: |Okay, so what does it coprocess? IEEE floats? Integers? Arrays? |Neural nets? Or is it a general-purpose cpu? It is a general purpose, high performance 32-bit RISC processor with a Harvard style memory bus. -- -- Phil Ngai, phil@amd.com {uunet,decwrl,ucbvax}!amdcad!phil We're saving water: we use disposable diapers.