[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson

[ChrisQ]

Johnny Billquist wrote:

> 
> So, the HP 755 (which shows the better numbers) gives about 80/150 for 
> int and fp, while the Alphas best is 130/200. That's more than what I'd 
> call "marginally better". But the big problems with the SpecINT and 
> SpecFP tests that they are so dependant on compilers that they don't 
> really show CPU speeds that you can compare, but show how good your 
> compiler is at compiling for those tests. And yes, compilers many times 
> had (do they still?) code that specifically detected these tests, and 
> popped out specially tuned code for them. So it's questionable how 
> relevant information from such tests are.
> 
> I remember walking around various fairs at the time the Alpha was new, 
> and all competitors machines were pretty slow in comparison at the time. 
> It was fun to watch all the vendors trying to show off, and it was 
> painfully obvious that compared to the Alpha they were slow.
>

I got hold of my first Alpha, a 3000/400 sometime in the early 90's and
whatever the benchmarks say, it was without doubt the fastest machine
I had ever seen at the time. Talking about interactive and compile 
performance.
Istr, it was running osf/1 version 1 or 2.

It was considerably faster than any Sparc machine in the lab and also an 
SGI
Indy webforce, which I think used an R4000 cpu. I do remember around 1995,
how an HP PA box at one client completely outshone the Sparc boxes we were
also using for software development, but was never able to do a direct
comparison with Alpha. At the time, hp were still a fairly respectable
engineering company, so it would be no surprise to learn that they knew what
they were doing with pa-risc.

Don't want to get back into the old thread, but Alpha was arguably one 
of the
best supported in software and os terms at it's peak, with performance to
match. Yet another example of politics and lies winning out over technical
excellence.

Have just done a trial install of Solaris 10 on a Compaq ML350 Xeon 3Ghz 
machine.
Noticeably faster than the same os on a Blade sparc machine, but not by 
that much...

Regards,

Chris