Whets.C benchmark VMS vs UNIX

[Eliot Moss]

Sometimes this tells a lot more about a *compiler* than it tells about
hardware. My guess is that the 80x86 compilers may not be as good at some
fancy optimizations, whereas the DEC C compiler is pretty good. If you want to
compare the hardware alone, code in assembly (but that does not give a fair
comparison if your programming will be in C). Another thing to do is to use
more similar compilers, e.g., the GNU C compielr, which I believe is available
for both of these machines/OSs. I also agree with the other respondent that it
is not necessarily a very informative benchmark; be very careful in this kind
of comparison! I would also not call a 3 MIP (or so) VAX "low-end"; one VAX
instruction can do a lot more than one 80x86 instruction in many cases, and
workstation I/O and memory systems are perhaps better designed than PC class
boxes (and mainframes even better than that, etc.).
--

		J. Eliot B. Moss, Assistant Professor
		Department of Computer and Information Science
		Lederle Graduate Research Center
		University of Massachusetts
		Amherst, MA  01003
		(413) 545-4206; Moss at cs.umass.edu