Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Using, learning, programming and modding the Gigatron and anything related.
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veekoo
Posts: 121
Joined: 07 Jun 2021, 07:07

Re: Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Post by veekoo »

Just run all the different sieve versions.
Sieve0: 41.1 seconds normal screen mode
Sieve0: 28.67 seconds fast screen mode <- Ratio 2.05

Sieve1: 39.22 seconds normal screen mode
Sieve1: 27.57 seconds fast screen mode <- Ratio 1.97

Sieve2: 29.72 seconds normal screen mode
Sieve2: 20.87 seconds fast screen mode <- Ratio 1.49

To me it seems very fast for whats inside the machine. Good job engineering this device! ;)
lb3361
Posts: 360
Joined: 17 Feb 2021, 23:07

Re: Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Post by lb3361 »

Did you use the same compilation option -map=64k,hionly as https://github.com/lb3361/gigatron-lcc/ ... e/Makefile ? That shouldn't impact the ratios but make the code a bit faster by avoiding long jumps between screen holes..
Last edited by lb3361 on 28 Oct 2022, 01:44, edited 1 time in total.
veekoo
Posts: 121
Joined: 07 Jun 2021, 07:07

Re: Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Post by veekoo »

lb3361 wrote: 01 May 2022, 14:37 Also, did you use the same compilation option -map=64k,hionly as https://github.com/lb3361/gigatron-lcc/ ... e/Makefile ? That shouldn't impact the ratios but make the code a bit faster by avoiding long jumps between screen holes..
I only changed -rom=dev, otherwise it was compiled same way
Last edited by veekoo on 24 Oct 2022, 08:07, edited 6 times in total.
lb3361
Posts: 360
Joined: 17 Feb 2021, 23:07

Re: Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Post by lb3361 »

That's probably correct. Modern computers are really fast, especially when they can work entirely from the memory cache...
veekoo
Posts: 121
Joined: 07 Jun 2021, 07:07

Re: Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Post by veekoo »

This is little bit OT, but did everybody knew that Cray 1 supercomputer 1970's used only ICs and had 200 000 gates. 1990's they started to use microprocessors. Thanks to sieve now we can compare all the machines. Cray 1 supercomputer(Fortran)-Sieve-benchmark 0.110 seconds. Thats 190 times faster than GigatronTTL.
walter
Site Admin
Posts: 160
Joined: 13 May 2018, 08:00

Re: Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Post by walter »

Nice. 190 times faster and 200.000 times more expensive :)

Still, the Cray-1 is better looking than the Gigatron. There's in in the Heinz Nixdorf museum in Paderborn Germany.
lb3361
Posts: 360
Joined: 17 Feb 2021, 23:07

Re: Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Post by lb3361 »

What would have been the price of Gigatron in the 70s? ICs were not as cheap, especially SRAM. Still a good deal compared to a Cray1...
veekoo
Posts: 121
Joined: 07 Jun 2021, 07:07

Re: Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Post by veekoo »

To get real world load to todays computers I modified sieve to "toughsieve"
Last edited by veekoo on 24 Oct 2022, 08:09, edited 2 times in total.
monsonite
Posts: 101
Joined: 17 May 2018, 07:17

Re: Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Post by monsonite »

lb3361 wrote: 02 May 2022, 11:14 What would have been the price of Gigatron in the 70s? ICs were not as cheap, especially SRAM. Still a good deal compared to a Cray1...
I have found various magazine adverts in online archives for TTL ICs from the 1970s.

Almost all of the TTL ICs used in the Gigatron were available by 1975. Typically they cost between $1 and $2 back then, but $1 in 1975 is the equivalent of $5.34 in 2022 prices.

EPROM and RAM were still very expensive, and had slow access times. EPROM was about 450nS and RAM about 250nS. That would slow the Gigatron clock down to about 1MHz.

You would probably only afford about 2K words of ROM and 2K of RAM. A video screen would have been out of the question, unless you used a character ROM or a serial terminal interface.

Custom made PCBs were unheard of back then - so you would probably have used wirewrap sockets on a big prototyping board.

Probably the best comparison is the Apple I from 1976 which was $666.66 in kit form, about $3000 equivalent today.

We are very lucky that we can buy a Gigatron kit today for about $100!
at67
Site Admin
Posts: 647
Joined: 14 May 2018, 08:29

Re: Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks.

Post by at67 »

Messing around with Mode 1975 and new instructions recently added to ROMvX0, we have a new leader board champ!
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