While on the topic of benchmarks... Does anyone here have experience with ALPHA or SPARC systems? A few years ago, I wrote a C program to distinguish between knots (input as an ordered list of coordinates of the vertices of a polygonal path). I ran the program on an SGI (don't remember what model.) Anyway, it took anywhere from a fraction of a second (for a simple overhand knot) to 15 minutes (for a knot with about 500 crossings). I did this for a research project at a university, using their equipment. Now, I'm interested in playing with the program again. My question is, does anyone have up-to-date benchmarks comparing recent SPARCS, ALPHAS, SGIs, intels, motorolas?
I did a little research on the web and found some info (a little outdated) that compared older SPARC's with Pentium III's. The benches said that for integer calculations, equivalent CPU speeds produced equivalent computation times. But, the 64-bit machines ran about 1.5 times as fast as the intels using floating-point calculations.
I'm considering picking up an older machine (Sun SPARC 5 or 20) from ebay. Will it outperform my shiny new AMD 1900+ with 512 MB memory? I suspect not. What about newer SUN's?
Thanks.