I was not going to comment on this as I am finding it quite enjoyable
and I am learning some things. I would like to interject a
performance comparison between an IBM 3081 and a Sun System and a PC.
I don't know if this is a good one or not, I will leave it up to the
reader.
Approximately 15 years ago we had an application that during its
processing needed to create a random number for every options trade.
This was written in COBOL (the random number was a psuedo random
number) A performance person was asked to look into it and figured
out that SAS had a better random number generator (the COBOL was OK
for the designer ie it didn't have to be truly random). At the time
there were the usual "wars" between the pc and the MF as to which was
better. SAS beat COBOL hands down.
The performance person was able to duplicate the test on a PC and a
SUN system. Funny thing in just raw cpu time the 3081 was 1/3 less
than the Sun
system and 50 percent less than the PC. The only I/O involved was to
read a file that had the options trade in it, no output was written.
Again I was not the person involved in the test but he was partial to
the Sun system going into the test. I will take his word that all
other things were equal. He was getting his timing from the
"standard" ways. I looked at the source briefly and it seemed on the
up and up, I did not have any reason to doubt him.
Ed
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