>: > Does anyone have the MIPS and MEGAFLOPS rating of a fast 486 ESA
>: > system? WE are constantly arguing here at work about speeds and I was
>: > wondering if anyone has benchmarked these things lately.
>:
>: Sorry, no MIPS or MEGAFLOPS (or SPECmarks) ratings, but rather I do have
>: a real-world, number-crunching application. Assuming a 50 MHz 486 is
>: twice as fast as a 25 MHz 486 (which is what I tested), then the Sparc-
>: station 2 is no more than 10 percent faster than the 486.
This is actually quite close. I can't speak to floating point
performance, but a 486-50DX EISA machine with a 256k memory cache will
usually hit right around 21 MIPS. This might actually outperform a
SPARC 2, which has a similar MIPS rating but is a RISC processor
(hence MIPS don't quite compare to MIPS on a CISC processor like the
i486). The only place I would expect a SPARCStation 2 to radically
outperform it is for graphics.
[By the way, a SPARCStation 2 is a Sun 4 (as is a SPARCStation 1+,
which is what the IPC is). That's why I changed the subject.]
>PC-Magazine recently compared the speed of a 486/50, Sun, Next, Mac, etc and
>found that the 486/50 was the fastest of the lot. They conducted benchtests
>by timing certain processor intensive operations in wordprocessors, spreadsheets, and desktop publishing using the same programs on all platforms. It is quite
>interesting reading....
I thought their tests were somewhat biased beforehand, since they
weren't measuring anything like the same thing on each machine. It
amounted to "how fast can I run PC-type applications on this machine".
--
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
in the real world." -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
