On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Simon Burge wrote:
> so crappy it's a good benchmark, but I can't distribute it).  On the
> PC164 it takes 25.87 seconds, but only 12.13 seconds on the 500/333 that
> DEC put on the internet for people to use years ago.  An AlphaServer
> 4000/710 finished in 15.79 seconds.  (I hope the model numbers make
> sense - I'm not really an alpha person.)

Any chance that it's the compiler that's making the difference? (DEC's
compiler vs. gcc) I tried comparing povray rendering the sample
"shadows.pov" on my 500MHz PC164 and Compaq's 533MHz machine that's on the
internet (perhaps the same one you're talking about? I don't remember the
model number...), and Compaq's machine was more than twice as fast. Then I
realized that I was using different compiler, and ran the DEC-compiled DU
binary on my machine and got much better results... the difference was
pretty much what one'd expect from the difference in CPU speed. I expect
povray's CPU-bound rather than memory bound though.
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