Running Some Tests
I had a little time today and decided to try to get a few performance numbers for barney by Indigo2. I've got shark my Ph.D. thesis simulator in g77/gcc and also have numbers for several different machines in my office. I was a little surprised to see what the numbers came out to be.
For the Weak Inversion - Triode Operation simulation I have the following total run times:
| Machine | CPU(s) | Speed | RAM | Time |
| sparky | 2 x SM61 | 60 MHz | 320MB | 3:22 |
| sparky | 4 x Ross 125 | 125 MHz | 320MB | 1:53 |
| mao | i686 | 266 MHz | 160MB | 1:03 |
| barney | R10000 | 195 MHz | 384MB | 0:38 |
| tux | 4 x Xeon | 500 MHz | 2.25GB | 0:33 |
| sherman | G5 | 2000 MHz | 2GB | 0:03 |
| peabody | Core2Duo | 2330 MHz | 3GB | 0:02 |
This puts barney at the top end. About what I expected. Again, there's a lot more to total system throughput than the CPU's MHz rating.I'm planning on doing a little development on barney and was just a little curious about the relative performance of him to the other boxes in the office.
UPDATE: When I ran the same tests on my iMac (sherman) it was clear that the new hardware really spanks the old guard - as nice as they were at the time.