Speed of SPARC 330/370

[Evan G. Bauman]

How fast is a SPARC 330/370 in floating point calculations?  This will
sure confuse the issue.

Just got my July/90 issue of README, the Sun User Group newsletter.
Inside is a table entitled "Performance Benchmark Results: Workstations".
Looking over the values for the DP Linpack test, I see that the SPARC 1+
is rated at 1.7 MFlops.  This isn't too far off the mark.  I measured it
at about 1.5.

The SPARC 330 and 370 are rated at 2.7 MFlops.  Now I find this
incredible.  We have a 330 and a 370 and my Linpack test only yields
1.7-1.8 MFlops.  In fact, here's the verbatim results directly from Mr.
Dongarra's benchmark.  This is from a SPARC 370 workstation, with FORTRAN
1.2, compiled with f77 -O.

     norm. resid      resid           machep         x(1)          x(n)
  1.67005097E+00  7.41628980E-14  2.22044605E-16  1.00000000E+00  1.00000000E+00

    times are reported for matrices of order   100
      dgefa      dgesl      total     mflops       unit      ratio
 times for array with leading dimension of 201
  3.800E-01  1.000E-02  3.900E-01  1.761E+00  1.136E+00  6.964E+00
  4.300E-01  1.000E-02  4.400E-01  1.561E+00  1.282E+00  7.857E+00
  3.700E-01  2.000E-02  3.900E-01  1.761E+00  1.136E+00  6.964E+00
  3.990E-01  1.200E-02  4.110E-01  1.671E+00  1.197E+00  7.339E+00

 times for array with leading dimension of 200
  3.800E-01  2.000E-02  4.000E-01  1.717E+00  1.165E+00  7.143E+00
  3.800E-01  2.000E-02  4.000E-01  1.717E+00  1.165E+00  7.143E+00
  3.900E-01  1.000E-02  4.000E-01  1.717E+00  1.165E+00  7.143E+00
  3.860E-01  1.300E-02  3.990E-01  1.721E+00  1.162E+00  7.125E+00

Does anybody know what's going on here?  Do we have a defective floating
point chip or is Sun just cooking the numbers to make themselves look good
against DEC and IBM?  I asked our sales rep., but he couldn't come up with
an answer.

Thanks.

	Evan G. Bauman
	Shell Development Company - Westhollow Research Center
	PO Box 1380; Houston, TX 77251-1380
	bauman at shell.com   or for the uucp types: {sun,bcm}!shell!bauman