Dear list,

I just recently acquired a Quadra 840AV for $35.  (I consider it a steal ;-> )

In theory, it should be faster than my Quadra 610, because it has
an 80 Mhz CPU w/ 40 Mhz bus and the Q610 has a 40 Mhz CPU with a 25 Mhz bus.
Depending on who you ask, the CPU rates on both may be half that, but in
any case, the 840 AV should be faster.

I ran some benchmarks, and the result are disappointing.
I'm running a newly installed NetBSD 1.4.1.

I run the following sophisticated CPU bmark.

  #include <stdio.h>

  static dummy = 0;

  #define MAX 1000000

  main()
        {
        int i;
        for ( i = 0 ; i < MAX ; i++ )
                funk();
        }

  int
  funk()
        {
        dummy = 0;
        }

This shows that the CPU on the 840 is about 30% faster than the Q610.
I show this with: "time a.out" on each system.

Unfortunately, when I do anything else, like compiles, gzip, etc, I
pretty consistently get poorer performance on the Q840.  I figured
this may be due to the relatively low-performance disk in it
(Quantum Fireball 1.2Gb)

So, I wrote a sophisticated I/O bencmark.

  mercy$ cat io.c
  #include <fcntl.h>
  #include <stdio.h>

  #define RECSZ   16384
  #define NREC    1024

  main()
        {
        int fd;
        char buf[RECSZ];

        fd = open("dummy", O_RDWR|O_CREAT, 0666);

        writem(fd, buf, RECSZ, NREC);
        }

  writem(int fd, char *buf, int recsz, int nrec)
        {
        int i;

        for (i = 0 ; i < nrec ; i++)
                write(fd, buf, recsz);
        }

What I saw was that when I built this and ran it on the two
systems side-by-side, the Q610 shows about 40 seconds of wall-time,
and the Q840AV shows only about 9.  Unfortunately, the Q840
finishes....

	about 20 seconds *after* the Q610.

The upshot is that while this program is running, the real-time/wall-time
clock on the Q840 slows down to about one tenth of its proper speed.

Two questions:

	1. Is there something broken on the Q840 that would slow down
	the CPU and/or I/O?  any options that I should be setting?

	2. Why does the clock behave so badly?  If this is a known
	problem in 1.4.1, will it be fixed in the (soon to be releaed??)
	1.4.2?

Thanks in advance,

-dgl-