hardware costs, again...

[Ed Hall]

In article <1990Jun8.083211.22300 at pegasus.com> richard at pegasus.com (Richard Foulk) writes:
> . . . .
>And I'm not sure the SLC would "blow the doors off any 386..."
>Where'd you get your data?  My 33MHz 386 is noticeably faster than a
>SparcStation 1 on integer only tasks -- I don't think the networking
>code does much floating point...

The SPARCStation, at least, doesn't have an integer multiply
instruction (though it does have a ``multiply step'' instruction to
make it easy to code a multiplication subroutine).  This skews
benchmark results, since unlike many benchmarks most system software
requires few multiplies except for subscript calculations, and Sun's
compiler does a pretty good job of strength-reduction and other tricks
to eliminate these.

I suspect the SLC is the same.

		-Ed Hall
		edhall at rand.org