Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: ifunltd@xs4all.hacktic.nl (ifunltd)
Subject: Re: T800 performance
Organization: Hack-Tic, networking for the masses
Date: 15 Jun 1994 20:21:20 GMT
Message-ID: <2tnnsi$bgm@news4all.hacktic.nl>

Frank D. M. Wilson (fwilson@park.bu.edu) wrote:
: Apologies if this is a FAQ.  Would someone be able to give me some
: idea of the processing power of a T800 transputer compared to (say)
: a 486DX33 ?  I don't want to open up the entire benchmarking can of
: worms ... I'm just looking for a rough "guestimate" :-)

As long as you're comparing a single-minded chip with an element in truly
scalable systems, you're losing anyway. But since you've asked for it...
I probably hold the world record for T805 performance: I got it to do a 
full 5.0 MFlops, whereas the specs say it has 4.3 MFlops peak. This does
not say anything about the usefulness of the calculated floating point
numbers, but then no performance figure does, until you test the chips
on real programs. And the problem really starts there: no benchmarks can
be done to compare single chips against parallel machines. There will always
be lots of details which need to be changed when moving from sequential to
parallel code. To me, the performance of a 486 is absolutely non-interesting,
since it is always fast enough to do my simple word-processing tasks (which
by the way are done on a 68030 in my case). When I want to calculate some
very compute-intensive task, I set the number of MFlops or GFlops I need
and start looking for the (parallel) machine that can give me that speed.
Unfortunately, not everyone can find those machines easily. But then, if
you have access to a single transputer, why can't you find more ? The whole
point of using a transputer is to use more of them without needing to change
your (assembler ?) code from one chip generation to the next. My old T414
is still joining in the work on a T805-based system, it does what you might
call some 'light secreterial work' and thereby helps to improve the total
system performance.

Hope this gives you some useful feedback on your question...



