[Info-vax] VUPS.COM relevance for modern CPUs

[David Jones]

I use the old Bytemark benchmark to do crude CPU comparison (old as in 
'normalized to a 90 Mhz Pentium'). The results are very sensitive to the compiler
and optimization levels, more so for gcc on X86 than the DEC OVMS compilers
on Alpha. Gcc defaults to no optimization and can improve 3-4 times while VSI 
C defaults to a fairly high level but doesn't improve as much over /nooptimize.

The current C cross compiler does no optimization and the result I've seen for
a 1.8 GHz gen 8 Xeon (released 2012) is about what I got for a 617 Mhz DS10
in 2001. Bytemark on my Mac mini (3 ghz i5) shows integer performance 20
times better and floating point 10 times better than the DS10.