Spotted in
Lies, damned lies and benchmarks (INMOS Technical Note 27)
which for some reason I find I have open in a tab.
The IMS T800 is the world’s fastest microprocessor…
The Dhrystone is a synthetic benchmark designed to test processor performance on ’systems programs’. In fact it has a number of flaws which seriously limit its usefulness as a guide to performance on ’typical’ programs. Unfortunately its use has become widespread, with results published on the USENET, and manufacturers reporting their performance in terms of ’Dhrystones per second’. It was originally published in Ada, but the most widely used version is a translation into C, distributed over USENET.
There are a couple of tables too, which is a nice nostalgic roll-call:
System | Thousands of Single-precision |
---|---|
Whetstones per Second | |
IMS T800-30 (projected) | 6800 |
IMS T800-20 | 4548 |
WE 32200/32206-24 | 2800 |
INTEL 80386 + 80387 | 1860 |
VAX 11/780 | 1083 |
MVII | 925 |
SUN-3 | 860 |
NS 32332/32081 | 728 |
IMS T414-20 | 704 |
NS 32032 and 32081 | 390 |
INTEL 286/287 | 300 |
IBM RT-PC + FPA | 200 |
IMS T212-20 | 181 |
INTEL 8086 + 8087 | 178 |
MC 68000 | 13 |
IBM RT-PC | 12 |