[rescue] SS10/SM51 not as lame as you think...

[Mike F]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366" <patrick at zill.net>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 12:52 AM
Subject: [rescue] SS10/SM51 not as lame as you think...


> A customer of mine is getting a custom app that pulls reporting info
> from Postgres and then runs it through lout to generate PS, then
> through ps2pdf to generate a PDF file.
> 
> So I decided to run some real-world tests: x86 vs. Sparc SM51.
> 
> x86: OpenBSD 3.0, AMD K6-2 450Mhz, 100MHZ PC100 RAM
> SPARC: OpenBSD 3.1, SM51 (50Mhz w 1MB cache), SS10 70 or 60ns RAM
> (there is not much difference between the 2 revs of the OSes)
> 
- snip -

I have similar machines to yours. I have a K6-2/450 and a SS10,
although mine has the wimpy SM40 processor (36MHz, no cache), and
both are running OpenBSD 3.1-stable. One trick I learned from
the OpenBSD-SPARC mailing list is to add "COPTS=-mcpu=v8" to your
/etc/mk.conf (create it if it doesn't exist.) Going from a stock
OpenBSD install to having the kernel and binaries compiled for
the architecture (v8) reveals a dramatic difference in speed.
I haven't done any benchmarking, but the impression of speed goes
from the stock install feeling like, well, a 36MHz processor, to
the optimized version feeling like a low-end Pentium. If you haven't
already used this CPU option, I would highly recommend it. And
report back on your results, of course. :)