> 
> On 27 Aug, David Maxwell wrote:
> [ A question that seems silly on the face of it, but prompts

The question was perhaps a bit unclear. Pure processor power benchmarks
are well known (if not well respected :-) for the more common machines -
that is, commercially promoted systems for sale usually get the most 
attention. Figures may be less available for some of the older architechtures
NetBSD supports. But the question meant to go a bit further. A couple of
years ago I would have placed NetBSD Sun3 as a lower performer than other
68k platforms because of the somewhat rudimentary SCSI driver that was 
implemented to start the port off. The performance of a whole system
suffered significantly in that case. Overall numbers of course depend on
the application, a UseNet News server would suffer more under those
conditions than a machine just providing DNS. And, on many systems NetBSD
provides better performance than the other *NIXs available.

	Certainly one question that begs asking is "what's the fastest
NetBSD machine you can have?" Certainly I'll try to note the fastest 
processor available for each port.

	I'm going to put together a page from the feedback I've gotten so
far, listing the relative performance - and I'll break it down to individual
chips as best I can to cover the range of performance. I'll post the URL
when ready. Any info on port related performance issues would be appreciated.
Obviously this is far from complete info, brand X scsi controller vs brand Y
will affect performance, perhaps significantly. I'm just building a point
of curiosity here, if there's enough interest I'd consider expanding the 
scope to include more detailed hardware profiles.

						David Maxwell
						david@vex.net