Floating point benchmarks for 11/73?

[Steven M. Haflich]

Now that folks have begun accumulating real experience with the 11/73
I'd like to hear if anyone can provide any benchmarks or even fuzzy
impressions of its floating point speed.  With good reason, DEC is
unwilling to release "instruction-timing" numbers.  These are usually
meaningless anyway (compare the 11/45!) because the overhead times for
communication between the FPP and the rest of a system can be
significant and very difficult to calculate.

My group is considering inexpensive networked 11/73 engines as
downloaded processors for some venerable production signal processing
code still running on an expensive PDP11/45.  Fixed-point comparisons
are easy to come by, but the code in question makes *extensive* use of
floating instructions.  Typical code has up to a 50% mix of floating op
codes, frequently hand intermixed with non-floating ops to take
advantage of execution overlap on the 11/45.

I'll summarize to the net.

Steve Hafich
{ihnp4, decvax!genrad}!mit-eddie!smh