#micron p60
John,
Comparing brand X rendering software running on an R4400 vs. brand Y running on
a Pentium is not a good way to compare the R4400 vs. the Pentium. Comparing
POV-Ray running on an AXP vs. POV-Ray running on a 486DX2/66 (the same source
code compiled for each machine) is a good way to compare the AXP vs. the
486DX2/66. POV is designed to be platform independent. There are happy POV
users on Mac, Amiga, Sun, PowerRISC, etc. The only way Jeff could have
possibly messed up the compilation is if he compiled it -O0 or something like
that, which I doubt he did. However, I doubt he bothered to run his test case
through the profiler then give the "hints" generated by the profiler to the
compiler so it could generate an executable optimized for running that
particular test case. This is what the RISC vendors do with Specmarks and other
industry standard benchmarks.
From his 2.4 to 3.5 times faster than the 486DX2/66 figures I interpolated that
the AXP is 1.3 to 1.4 times faster than Pentium by giving the Pentium a very
conservative 1.8-2.5 advantage over the 486.
Back when I ran my own POV benchark against Sparc2 and R3000, the R3000 was,
except for the then brand spanking new R4000 Crimson (at around $80-100K), all
that SGI had.
The reason the high end software runs on SGI is that SGI has delivered heavy
duty graphics platforms for years. You don't see SoftImage et al running on an
HP9000 do you? That's because the graphics people have been running/are
running/will be running SGI, not HP. It's not because the PA-RISC/99MHz
couldn't render faster than the R4400.
I'm not pooh-poohing SGI or any other high-end machine. You don't see anything
like the SGI memory bus or Extreme graphics for PCs. I'm just saying that if
rendering program Z runs N/M faster on machine X than on machine Y, then there
is a good chance that 3DS will probably render N/M faster on machine X than on
machine Y if it were compiled for machine X and machine Y.
Bailey