Most benchmarks indicate that the 5/266 outperforms any other single
processor machine by a large margin. When running the Mathematica package,
however, for certain tasks the performance of the Alpha drops dramatically.
As an example, diagonalizing a random 200x200 matrix appears to take almost
as long on a 5/266 as on a Mac Quadra.
The list of benchmarks showing this, did not give specifics on memory & cache
size of the machines on which the benchmarks were run, so the question is
whether with "sufficient" memory & cache size the 5/266 would remain the
top performer? If so, what would consitute "sufficient size"?
Thank you for shedding light on this issue.
Helmut Vogel
Dept of Physics, Carnegie Mellon University
PS: The main contenders in the race were the HP735 and various SGI's.
Received on Thu Oct 26 1995 - 21:55:14 NZDT