Chip Mhz comparisons

[Mark Szidik - MLC]

At the last meeting there was a little discussion of x86 chip Mhz versus
RISC chip Mhz.  I think that this excerpt from a review shows pretty
clearly that Mhz is not the only factor in measuring performance.


The full review is at:
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2000-06/lw-06-rave.html

Here is some snips from the review.  

The Rave Tower AXi that we reviewed came with 256 MB of RAM, a 360 MHz
UltraSPARC IIi processor with 2 MB of L2 cache.

Speed demon 
When it comes to pure compilation speed, that system takes
the cake. It took about 5 minutes and 22 seconds to compile the full
version of gcc-2.95-1, compared to 16 minutes or so for the
dual-processor 733 MHz Pentium III Dell Precision Workstation 410 that
we tested a few weeks ago (see Resources). Both have Red Hat 6.1
installed, although the Dell version was kernel version 2.2.5-15 SMP to
handle the dual processors. As the compiler, the Dell had egcs-2.91.66
installed while the Rave had egcs-2.92.11. That might not be a
completely fair comparison, as the compiler on the Dell system might not
have taken full advantage of the dual processors. Even so, compared to a
350 MHz AMD K6-2 system, which took about 39 minutes and 30 seconds to
do the same compilation, that is one heck of a speed demon. It isn't
even the fastest of the UltraSPARC IIi processors; Rave also offers a
faster 440 MHz version, a slower 300 MHz with 512 KB L2 cache, a 360 MHz
with only 256 KB cache, and a 333 MHz with 2 MB cache.



-Mark