We compared the FirePower MX to a Telos 100-MHz Pentium with 64MB of
RAM, IPC Technologies PowerPlay 604/100 (a 100-MHz PowerPC with 32MB of
RAM--another machine using a FirePower system board), and a Motorola PowerStack
(a 133-MHz PowerPC 604 system with 64MB of RAM). All machines ran under Windows
NT Workstation 3.51.
The test consisted of a timed Microsoft Test 3.0 script running Elastic
Reality from Avid Technology, a true 32-bit morphing and warping program that
has been ported to all four NT platforms (Intel, PowerPC, MIPS, and Alpha). I
used the program's stock images of George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant as
they appear on US currency and morphed the image of Washington to the image of
Grant to create a composite image that shared the features of both. I saved the
resulting transformation to an .avi file. Calculated test time includes program
load, morphing and rendering, and saving to the .avi file. Graph A shows the
test runtime on each of the four machines.