106 mip PC

[william E Davidsen]

In article <12487 at netcom.UUCP>, jbreeden at netcom.uucp (John Breeden) writes:
|> Does anyone know any details about AT&T's Starserver E? The lit I have 
|> says it's a true symmetrical, multiprocessor 33mhz 486 (4 processors).
|> They claim a MIP rating of 106MIPS (yea!, I know. That's faster than
|> a 3090!), and they are shipping it!

  That sounds reasonable, given the numbers Corrolary was getting from a
4 CPU Z1000, and 4 CPU 4x486 at 25MHz. If you have a nice load of small
jobs which eat the cpu and high load average, then you should benefit.
If your load average is low (1 cpu hog) then this won't help much.

  As a guess, if vmstat shown more than one runnable process most of the
time (not the same as load average) and/or the system cpu time is high,
you will get a boost from the extra cpu's.

  I did some benchmarks (informal) for troff server use, using something
like:

  soelim mytest.n | tbl | equ | troff -p | roff2ps > output.ps

and the results were impressive. Note that I have five processes in the
pipe to insure making the multicpu systems look good. The Corrolary
really did!
--
Bill Davidsen (davidsen at crdos1.crd.ge.com, uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
  GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
  Moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc and 386users mailing list
"Stupidity, like virtue, is it's own reward" -me