Chuck,

We tried a PowerUp earlier this year and were sufficiently pleased with the results
that we purchased a bunch more of them. Here is a summary of some (application
specific) performance tests I ran.


Date: Sat, 8 Jan 94 19:07:19 EST
Subject: Sparc accelerator works
Reply-To: <stsci.edu at lucks>

A Weitek POWER uP chip was installed yesterday on my Sparc 2 and it
appears to work as advertised. On my Spike benchmark (which loads 326
proposals and propagates constraints), it runs only about 3% slower
than a Sparc 10 in CPU activity. Overall (CPU + disk I/O), it runs
about 17% slower.

By comparison, a Sparc 2 runs about 30% slower than a Sparc 10 for CPU
activity, and 44% slower overall.

Here are the stats.

Machine    Type          CPU       non-CPU       Real       
                        (mins)     (mins)       (mins)

loki       SS10           53          8           61        
hoku       SS2/powerUp    55         18           73        
mingus     SS2            76         32          108        

It looks like the chip turns a Sparc 2 into near CPU-equal of a Sparc
10 -- and I/O performance is about midway between the SS2 and SS10.

A good deal for $1,500.

-- Mike