Re: sun and symbolics development environments

[Christopher Garrigues <7thSon@spar-20.arpa>]

    Date: Mon, 27 Jul 87 18:38:00 PDT
    From: Malcolm Slaney <spar!malcolm@decwrl.dec.com>

    [ . . . ]

    First, ignoring the environment, GC and floating point issues, the 
    performance of a Sun 3/160 running either Lucid or Franz Lisp is anywhere 
    from .5 to 2 times the speed of a Symbolics machine.  I am willing to
    claim that a 68020 running at 16MHz is roughly comparable in speed to
    a Symbolics machine.  Moving to a Sun 3/260 gives a factor of two 
    performance increase with no change in your code.  The Sun 4's are supposed
    to be another factor of 2 faster still but I haven't had a chance to
    benchmark their lisp performance.

In the interests of accuracy, one should talk about the configuration of
the machine being compared.  I don't know much about the Suns here yet,
but most of the Symbolics machines are running with less than 2
megawords, and some only have one megaword.  (Symbolics currently
recommends a minimum of 2 megawords.)  Malcolm doesn't say which
machines he used for comparison.  (He also doesn't say anything about
the application used for benchmarking.)

    OK, now the caveats.

    First the environment.  This is religeous and I'm not in the mood to
    start the argument again..... :-)

Somebody told me that a Sun's marketing presentation rated Symbolics as a
10 for development environment and themselves as a 6.  I don't know if
this is true, but it's a great story.  :-)

    [ . . . ]