>> Just a really quick follow-up. Using pkgsrc/benchmarks/flops (which
>> specifically says that it's small enough for any cache), I did a few
>> comparisons. For simplicity, I am using units of mflops per 10 MHz 
>> since
>> the clock speeds are all over the place. Also, flops includes four
>> results; I'm using results 1 and 4, since 1 includes fdiv and 4 does 
>> not.
>>
>> G5:
>> 3.3, 3.42  (OS X)
>>
>> G4 7457:
>> 1.95, 3.39  (NetBSD 2.0)
>> 1.96, 3.53  (OS X)
>>
>> G3 750FX:
>> 2.27, 4.94  (OS X)
>>
>> G3 750:
>> 2.11, 4.87  (NetBSD 1.6)
>> 2.11, 4.73  (NetBSD 2.0)
>>
>> 604ev:
>> 2.4, 6.05   (NetBSD 1.6)
>>
>> 603e:
>> 1.94, 4.2   (NetBSD 1.6)
>> 2.03, 3.91  (NetBSD 2.0)
>>
>> m68060:
>> 1.3, 2.6    (NetBSD 1.6)
>>
>> m68040:
>> .88, 1.16   (NetBSD 1.6)
>>
>> So yes, the 604 beats out everything except the G5, and even beats 
>> out the
>> G5 in floating point code without fdiv.
>
> Just for fun I ran the same test on a few more boxes, all compiled 
> with CPU-specific optimizations enabled and -O2. Here are the results:
> UltraSPARC IIi, Sun U10:
> 2.99, 3.98	(NetBSD 2.99.16, 64bit)
>
> MicroSPARC II, Tadpole SPARCbook 3GX
> 1.28, 2.23	(NetBSD 2.99.16)
>
> 604e, Motorola PowerStack II:
> 2.38, 5.82	(AIX 4.3.2, gcc)
>
> G3 750, UMAX Pulsar:
> 2.10, 4.72	(NetBSD 2.99.16)
>
> MIPS R10k, SGI Indigo2:
> 4.96, 16.39	(IRIX 6.5.19, gcc -mabi=n32)
> 5.20, 16.27	(IRIX 6.5.19, gcc -mabi=64)
>
> Athlon XP:
> 4.61, 7.06	(FreeBSD 4.11)
>
> I ran the test on the PowerStack with xlc too, but even with 
> 'potentially semantics altering' optimization the results differed 
> less than one percent from those obtained with gcc. As expected the 
> MIPS runs circles around everyone else in raw FLOPS per clock, but the 
> Athlon did quite a bit better than I expected. All tests were done 
> with gcc 3.3.[3|4|5].

the R10000 was also called 'T5' when it was announced; it was known to 
be an extraordinary good performer on FPU tasks (as was its 
predecessor, the R8000 :).

i searched a bit today in my archives on more information to do a short 
604(e(v)) <-> R19k comparison, unfortunately i'm very shot of time :(

one thing's for sure: it's a SHAME sgi letting die MIPS :'(

-- 
Timo Schoeler | http://macfinity.net/~tis
//macfinity -- finest IT services | http://macfinity.net
Key fingerprint = F844 51BE C22C F6BD 1196  90B2 EF68 C851 6E12 2D8A

There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary 
and those who don't.