Dhrystone 2.0 timings

[Shawn Hayes]

      Well, this want answer all the questions about how fast the new RS 6000
machines really are, but here is my attempt to help. 

     I recently got a copy of the Dhrystone program V2.0 and ran it on our
RS 320 machine.  The results aren't quite what IBM stated (using V1.0), but
that shouldn't be a big suprise.  :>  I got a value of 11,881.2 dhrystones/sec
using a non-optimized version, and a value of 18,867.9 dhrystones/second
using the optimizer.  Averages out to about 11 MIPS which isn't bad.  
  
     In addition I decided to run another test today and ran 11 copies of the
optimized version at the same time.  I got about 18,700 dhrystones/sec on
10 of the copies and about 14,000 on the last copy.  Not bad at all.

    Speaking of benchmarks I have two requests.  
First, does anyone know of any good system level benchmarks?  I've heard that
BYTE has some Unix benchmarks, but I haven't seen the program anywhere on the
network.  I'd like to do some real system level timings if there's anything
available.

Second,  does anyone know how much time an RS 6000/320 will take to do a context
switch??????   We've talked to our SE, but she doesn't have any hard info
and can't seem to get any from Austin.  It's critical to our application that
it not be worse than 2 milliseconds, and her guess was 10 milliseconds.  I don'tthink that's accurate so if anyone knows please email me or post in this group.

                                                  Shawn Hayes