Benchmarks
==========

When  I  saw Logout's  post  about  Windows  NT  3.1 [1]  and  software
non-compatibility then I  have tried to find what version  on the ANSYS
[2] I saw at  the BUT in Brno in late nineties. I  never used NT 3.x in
person (my first NT  at the BUT was the 4.0) and the  firs ANSYS that I
have used was the 5.3.

But I found this nice marketing document  [4] in which the ANSYS 5.3 on
the Windows NT 3.51 is cited. Thus I  assume that at the BUT it was the
ANSYS 5.x what they were used i that time.

I also studied the tables and graphs  inside the [4]. There is a lot of
comparison of  PentiumPro-based machines with their  UNIX counterparts.
As  I have  been  a SGI  used  for a  long time,  I  was curious  about
PentiumPro-to-MIPS comparisons.  And they  are non a  fair one  in this
paper (of course?). The poor low-end  SGI Indy with R5000 CPU (that one
which is  optimised for  single-precision float point  computations and
not  for  double-precision  computations)  is listed  in  most  of  CPU
performance  tables.  There  is  almost  no  comparison  with  machines
equipped with  more powerful R10000 CPUs  (or at least with  those with
older R4400 ones).  It is nice that PentiumPro is  2x faster than R5000
but R10000 should be 2x-4x faster than  the R5000. It is the reason why
it is absent here?

First I  thought that they  wanted to compare their  PentiumPro product
with low-end workstations only. But  in the graphics performance tables
there are named  Indigo2 machines with R4400 CPU and  even with R10000!
In  some places  one even  can  find the  rare POWER  Indigo2 with  its
multi-core CPU (it  does not perform well in the  particular test where
it is shown - but it may  be fair as its unusual CPU required specially
tuned code to use full power of that CPU).

I remember a case of one of my colleagues at the BUT. He wrote a finite
element method code  and ran in on  its Intel desktop (I  think that it
had the Pentium II,  not the older Pro) with the Linux  OS. When he ran
the same code on a SGI Origin 2000 computer then the execution time was
seven time shorter. Of course, if was also influenced by the difference
between the GCC  compiler on the Linux and the  MIPSpro compiler on the
SGI (I assume that at that  time the MIPSpro produced better code which
was very well optimized for the  R10000 CPU). Anyway, the R10000 ran on
195 MHz  and the  Pentium was over  200 MHz -  so the  frequencies were
comparable -  and the "slower" CPU  was many times faster.  But the [4]
tries to convince the reader that it is not the case ;-)

OK, all  this makes little sense  today. But I have  somewhat nostalgic
mood now. I should run the ANSYS tomorrow to compute something...

References:
[1] http://technomorous.eu/post/165483206330
[2] http:///www.ansys.com
[3] https://www.fce.vutbr.cz/en_2014/
[4] http://datasheets.chipdb.org/Intel/x86/Pentium%20Pro/24299903.pdf