Comments on new suns

[Mike Wolf]

I'm fairly wary of Sun's benchmark statistics for the new sparc machines.
While I'm willing to believe that you can get that performance with just
one user running only the dhrystone benchmark, I've seen a lot of 3rd
party benchmarks which say that sparc gets REALLY slow when multiple
processes want CPU time.  If I remember correctly, the cause was supposed
to be a large context-switch time.

Myself, I'm waiting for the MIPS benchmarks.  Has anyone else been reading
that magazine?  They're new as of January, and I've been very impressed.

Also, as to the price/performance, Data General has a Sys V 88000 box
which is supposed to be considerably faster then a DEC 3100.  about
$14,000 for the complete setup with workstation monitor and a couple
hundred meg of disk.

- Michael Wolf
wolf at ssyx.ucsc.edu
...!ucbvax!ucscc!ssyx!wolf