by Hi all,
I have been put in charge of purchasing a UNIX workstation for our
group's research. Being new to the game, I called Sun, IBM and HP for
their information brochures for machines in the ~ $20,000 range. I was
soon swamped with faxes, quotes and calls from salesman claiming their
machines were superior.
I have noticed that the brochure lists 'benchmarks' (SPECfp92, SPECint92,
etc...). These benchmarks do not seem like a proper way to describe
the machines performance.
Also, I am new to ReadNews. Could anyone out there tell me how to
compare
the performance of the IBM RiSc 365 and the Sun SparcStaion10 (Model 42)
fairly? I DO NOT want Sun weenies or IBM weenies to reply swearing on
their mother's grave that their machine is superior, just 'because'.
I feel like the Nissan comercial, "I have the money, tell me what to
buy."
Oh, just so you have a concept of what we're looking for. Our work
centers on shear floating point calculation speed. No Graphics. Any
microsecond of CPU time that is not dedictaed to FLOPS is wasted. Also,
all of our codes are written in FORTRAN ( Don't give me shit about the
language either - not my choice). So, if the RiSc has a better FORTRAN
compiler than the Sun, or, vice versa, I would like to know about that too.
I cannot tell how frustrating it has been talking to sales 'engineers'
who do not know their machines capability. I am conifdent that the general
public knows more than they do.
Thank you.
Drew A. Pommet
Center for Research in Electro-Optics and Lasers
Orlando, FL
PS: If you are from Sun or IBM, your sales staff in the Orlando area
SUCKS!!!
PSS: Feel free to email me directly.