Many reported computer execution-speed benchmarks involve artificial programs exploring the fixed- and floating-point instruc tion sets. Instead, we report results from two actual dynamic- system simulation problems long used as benchmarks by the simulation community. PHYSBE (Korn and Wait 1978) is a blood- circulation model used in physiological studies, and the Hidinger benchmark (Hidinger 1982) is a practical three-dimensional flight simulation (really a torpedo/ autopilot simulation) developed at the Naval Ocean Systems Center. Such programs can give realistic indications of practical results obtainable with different machines.
Specifically, we report on a study of measured and predicted simulation speeds of personal computers with speeded-up clocks and of new 32-bit personal computers. This is a glimpse into a new, bright world of very cost-effective simulation; an 80386/ 387-based PC clone outruns a timeshared VAX 11/780 in the flight-simulation benchmark.
