The Systems Performance Evaluation Co-operative has come out with a new set of results from running Release 1.0 of its Benchmark Suite on 47 computers and workstations, which seem to suggest that the latest RISC machine from MIPS Computer Systems Inc, the RC6280, and the Control Data 4680 variant of it, sweep all before it in the perforamnce stakes. The co-op also announced that Fujitsu Ltd and Bull SA are its latest members and bring the total to 19, although one of those is Multiflow, in the process of liquidating. The co-op also has a new methodology and metric for comparing performance that is particularly appropriate for multiprocessing systems. The new SPECthruput measures and characterises how much work a system can do given a certain workload – in this case, multiple copies of the Release 1.0 benchmarks. The latest tables of results from the Performance Co-operative will be published in a future issue.
