From: steve@interaccess.com (Steve Norton) Subject: Re: How does Linux compare to SUN IPC? Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1993 19:41:29 GMT
a228dhal@cdf.toronto.edu (Dhaliwal Bikram Singh) writes:
>It has seemed to me that my Linux system at home (X and GCC running in
>a 15mb partition, on a 386-40, with room to spare) is faster than the
>SUN IPC workstations I use at school. I can only offer subjective
>speculation though, ie. time for a xterm to open, etc...
Well, here at the office, we've had 4 machines: One 386-40, 8 MB of
RAM, one 486-66, 16 MB of RAM, one Sparc-10 with 64 MB of RAM and
one Sparc-2 with 32 MB of RAM.
The 386-40 ($1000) will process Usenet news about 2x faster than the
Sparc-10 ($20,000). Of course, this is entirely due to the super fast
Linux I/O. Processing news is all disk access, and the IDE drives blow
away the sun SCSI-2 drives. Unfortunately, the Sparc-10 is faster for just
about everything else.
The 486-66 ($3000) runs 10-25% faster than the Sparc-2 ($7000) for CPU
intensive activities (compiling, crunching numbers, Xlife, etc.) For I/O
things (xli on Xwindows) it completely blows the Sparc-2 away.
Now, I'm kind of biased. I personally believe Sparcs are junk, and that
a 40Mhz motherboard with a 386 is just as good as a 40Mhz Sparc motherboard.