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		SUN ENDORSES FIRST SPEC BENCHMARKS
 
 
NEW YORK CITY --October 2, 1989-- Sun Microsystems today
announced its support of the initial release of the Systems Performance
Evaluation Cooperative (SPEC) Benchmark Suite, unveiled here at a SPEC
press conference.  Sun is one of the four founding members of SPEC.
Release 1.0 of the suite focuses on the CPU level of system
performance.  Over time, the SPEC suite will include other key
components used by "real-world" applications, such as I/O, graphics,
communications and multi-processing.
 
SPEC was created to define a common base of software for measuring
different aspects of system performance.  Computer vendors had
previously been unable or unwilling to agree to a common set of
industry-standard benchmarks.  This made it virtually impossible for
users to find common measurements between competing computer vendors.
 
According to Dave Ditzel, Sun's Director of Advanced Development,   
"Customers have been demanding a suite of tests that will run on the
leading manufacturers' systems so they can get a fair representation of
system performance.  Open benchmarks are a natural follow-on to open
systems, which Sun has been advocating for years."
 
However, Ditzel added that there has been criticism in the industry over the
proper and fair evaluation of systems.  Previous de facto standard
benchmarks were usually small programs that were too susceptible to
overzealous tuning that misrepresented true performance. "We would be
delighted if customers started asking how our machines rated in
SPECmarks instead of Dhrystones," he said.
 
"Along with a SPEC figure, we'll continue to rate our machine
performance in MIPS," Ditzel explained.  "This tells Sun's customers how
new machines perform relative to our older products, even though MIPS are
not an accurate mechanism of comparing performance industry-wide.  The
SPEC benchmarks will now allow more meaningful comparisons between computer
vendors."
 
The SPEC benchmarks demonstrated that Sun's compilers are robust and highly
optimizing compared to the competition.  "The initial figures show that
Sun's compilers often generate code that executes fewer instructions for the
same tasks than the best compilers of our competitors.  That's the
measure of a good optimizing compiler," said Ditzel.  Sun's optimizing
compilers will greatly enhance SPEC results when the next wave of SPARC
microprocessors appear in systems.  The SPARC(TM) strategy of
opening up implementations to multiple semiconductor vendors ensures a
steady stream of new SPARC processors.
 
While Sun is shipping 25-MHz SPARC systems today, future SPEC
benchmarks can look forward to seeing a number of SPARC vendors start
to ship systems based on the currently available 40-MHz CMOS SPARC
chips from Cypress/Ross Technology and the 80-MHz ECL SPARC chips from
Bipolar Integrated Technology.
 
"SPEC is one small step for benchmarking, but a giant leap for
obtaining meaningful performance data across vendors," said Ditzel.
"Although the initial SPEC release only measures one aspect of a
complete system, it's obvious we are making significant progress in the
right direction."  With the completion of additional components, users
will be able to better evaluate an entire system's performance,
including access to disk drives and subsystems, graphics, networking
and, eventually, multi-processing.
 
Sun Microsystems, Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., is a
leading worldwide supplier of network-based distributed computing
systems, including professional workstations, servers and UNIX
operating system and productivity software.
 
###
 
UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T.  SPARC is a trademark of Sun
Microsystems, Inc.  All other products or services mentioned in this
document are identified by the trademarks or service marks of their
respective companies or organizations.
 
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