[rescue] point of pride in SGI R10k vs. 1Ghz x86...

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

Thought y'all might appreciate this.

Had a buddy over for a few hours on Saturday.  He is pretty handy with
the Gimp, so I asked him to try out the speediness of the Gimp on my
Indigo2, which has a 195Mhz R10k with 1MB cache, and Solid Impact
graphics.

He played with it, zipped up a couple layers, then went into Fractal
generation, then later added a Plasma layer and finished up with
Gimpressionist.  All of these take some serious CPU time, especially
when doing a 1280x1024 true color image.

It was almost as fast as his shiny new 1Ghz Athlon, he said.  Say equal
to a 900Mhz Athlon.  His Athlon has the DDR RAM btw as well.

So the R10k in this case feels as fast as something with 4-5 times the
clock speed of x86.

(I once benched some compilation under x86 vs a SM51 on an old SS10. 
the SM51 is about as fast as a P166MMX in that case, or a >2.5
multiplier over x86.)

Cordially

Patrick Giagnocavo
patrick at zill.net