The companies tired of IBM attacking their machines with proprietary benchmarks that they couldn’t reproduce that set up the Systems Performance Evaluation Council have been given a nasty jolt by the first set of independent benchmarks from the Council on the new IBM RS/6000 Unix machines. Running the first Spec benchmark, which takes the geometric mean of the time to complete a suite of engineering and scientific routines – all primarily compute-intensive, with no measure of input-ouput or multi-tasking, the smallest of the new IBM machines come out over four Specmarks ahead of their nearest rival. Recorded Specmarks go from 34.7 on the 30MHz RS/6000 Model 540, 28.9 on the 25MHz Models 930, 730 and 530, and 22.3 on the 20MHz 520 and 320. Nearest competitor is the 88100-based Motorola Delta 8612 with 33MHz 88000 processor, at 17.8, and the MIPS Computer Systems M/2000 and Sun Microsystems Sparcserver 490 at 17.6 apiece. A five processor DEC VAX 6000 450 under VMS comes in at 9.2 – but the nature of the benchmark is such that a uniprocessor DEC VX 6000 Model 410 comes in at 6.8. RS/6000 special – pages 2, 3 and 4
