"The IMS T800 is the world’s fastest microprocessor"

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
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<3 We all have those reasons here, Ed!

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