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From: dank@blacks.jpl.nasa.gov (Dan Kegel)
Subject: Re: Anything wrong with the i860
Message-ID: <dank.674423728@blacks>
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Organization: Image Analysis Systems Group, JPL
References: <1991May7.145407.18417@midway.uchicago.edu> <3486@charon.cwi.nl> <3986@ssc-bee.ssc-vax.UUCP>
Date: 16 May 91 19:55:28 GMT

carroll@ssc-vax (Jeff Carroll) writes:
>... an Intel/Boeing team found that it was possible to achieve very nearly 
>peak performance from the i860 using very little assembly code, on certain 
>problems.

I just ran a stupid benchmark (the FFT from Numerical Recipies, length 1024,
2000 reps) on both a Sun 4/470 and an Alliant FX/2800.  On the Sun, I used
f77 -fast; on the Alliant, fortran -O.  Performance was within 10% of identical.
[Gee, everyone said the i860 was much faster than a Sun; guess I misunderstood.]

Now that I've compared the speed of Fortran programs, I'd like to compare the
speed of hand-coded assembly versions of the same thing.
The Alliant comes with a canned signal processing library which is presumably
hand-optimized assembly code.
Does anyone know of such a library for the Sun 4?
- Dan K
