[Simh] Questions on SIMH VAX

[Hittner, David T (IS)]

"VUPS was largely gone by the end of the VAXen" is true, but ... :-)

Digital/Compaq published a list (which I think is still somewhere on
HP's archived pages) of VAX and Alpha VUPS comparisons for people to
compare where they were and where they could be to encourage them to buy
a new system. The VUP.COM procedure used to measure your VMS system's
VUPS rating has been freely available for a long time.

Here's HP's current authoritative page on VUPS and SPEC:
http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/performance/vups_297.html#grafs

Many people still use VUPS ratings to predict or compare relative
performance of various VMS systems, because it's a simple benchmark that
most people understand, even though it's CPU-centric.

FWIW, these are my company's system ratings to give people on the list a
relative idea of VUPS performance ranges:
	System			VUPS
	--------------------	-----
	Integrity rx2660		575.4
	Integrity rx2600		533.2
	AlphaPC 154LX/533		167.6
	AlphaServer 1200 5/533	154.2
	VAX 4000-500		22.0
	MicroVAX 3100-90		18.6
	VaxStation 4000/VLC	5.8
My company bought low end systems - the enterprise VAX/Alpha/Integrity
systems are much faster. Enterprise VAXes went into the 700s, the Alphas
went into the mid-to-high thousands, and the Integrity SuperDomes can
exceed 10,000 VUPS.

My 3-year-old 2.1GHz laptop can usually get 5-20 VUPS running SIMH,
FreeAXP, and PersonalAlpha.

Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-bounces at trailing-
> edge.com] On Behalf Of Zane H. Healy
> Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2010 10:22 PM
> To: Rich Alderson
> Cc: simh at trailing-edge.com
> Subject: Re: [Simh] Questions on SIMH VAX
> 
> At 9:21 PM -0400 6/10/10, Rich Alderson wrote:
> >  > Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:45:35 -0700
> >>  From: "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com>
> >
> >>  I thought a VAX-11//780 was both 1 MIP, and 1 VUP.
> >
> >Zane,
> >
> >ITYM "MIPS".  It's not a plural, it's an abbreviation of "second".
> >
> >Anyway, although Digital's marketeers tried to claim that the 780 ran
> at
> >1MIPS, it was clearly doing about half that in any decent benchmark.
> That's
> >the reason they came up with the VUP, very quickly.  AFAIK, no one
> else ever
> >bothered to use the VUP as a measure, even if they were into MIPS.
> >
> >                                                                 Rich
> 
> On a good day I mean MIPS.  :-)  Even VUP's was largely gone by the
> time the last of the VAXen were released.  I hadn't heard the 1 MIPS
> rating was marketing BS, but it doesn't surprise me.  Somewhere I
> used to have some pretty good speed charts with different machines
> that interested me, and ones that could be used to tie the different
> charts together.
> 
> Zane
> 
> 
> 
> --
> | Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
> | healyzh at aracnet.com              | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
> |                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
> +----------------------------------+----------------------------+
> |     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
> |          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
> |                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |
> _______________________________________________
> Simh mailing list
> Simh at trailing-edge.com
> http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh