[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson

[Michael Kraemer]

ChrisQ schrieb:

> 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. 

Well, we don't know what the actual configuration of these
machines were nor whether they were really comparable
(i.e. same time frame, comparable RAM and disk etc.) and
probably not even you will remember that after such a long time.
That's exactly what benchmarks are for, provide reproducible
results under controlled conditions, beyond "personal feelings".
Spec doesn't test compile performance,
but anyway this will depend less on CPU but
much more on amount of available RAM,
disk speed and size, whether the disk is local or NFS mounted etc.

> 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,

It's not too difficult to be faster than a Sparc :-)

> 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.

HP snakes were much more "sexy" than any Alpha of 1993/94.
Not only they were faster, but they also had an outstanding desktop,
HP-VUE, which helped a lot in gaining popularity.