Benchmarking Engineering Workstations

As workstations become more popular, it is increasingly important to be able to measure and compare their relative performance. However, benchmarks are often either too specific to be of general interest or too general to be relevant to a specific application. We have constructed a collection of benchmarks¿for a common kind of engineering workstation¿that give a good approximation of processor, graphics, file access, and multitasking performance while being small and simple enough to easily transport. We have run the benchmarks on a number of workstations, including Sun-3, Apollo 560, VAXstation-II, and IRIS 2400, with overall results meeting our approximate expectations. Our approach allows us to quickly assess the performance of new workstations.