Quote:
Tonight I raced a Sun Ultra 10 workstation (300 Mhz Ultrasparc II) running Solaris 8 64 bit against a PIII 550 x86 box running RedHat 7. The Sun has 128 Mb RAM and a 4500 rpm IDE disk. The PC has 256 Mb EDO RAM and an ATA66 disk turning 7200 rpm.
Unfortunately, there are too many variables here for this to be very meaningful. If you could equip both machines with the same amount of RAM, and the same type of disks, the results might be more interesting.
The best (informal) benchmark that I have found is to run the <A HREF="http://www.distributed.net">distributed.net</A> client with the "-benchmark" flag. It has pretty low memory usage, making the amount of RAM largely irrelevant, and disk I/O is almost zero, so you basically just get a floating point/integer benchmark. (still highly unscientific, of course).
Stats:
PIII, 1Ghz w/ RedHat 7.0: 2.8 million keys/sec.
HP 5 cpu K-class @ 200 Mhz w/ HP-UX 11.00: 2.1 million keys/sec
My old HP C110 workstation, running at 120Mhz w/ HP-UX 11.00: 205,000 keys/sec.
Original Pentium @ 133Mhz w/ Slackware: 189,000 keys/sec