Is HiPE faster than the Beam emulator?

[Roger Price]

I wrote an simulator in Erlang for a machine which does many things at the
same time.  Using the Beam emulator in otp_src_R7B-4 running on SuSE Linux
7.1 it performed just over 10000 actions per second.

I then downloaded otp_src_R8B-1.tar.gz, unpacked, configured with
--enable-hipe , make, make install.  I then erased all my .beam files and
recompiled my main program using c(main,[native]) in the new Eshell
V5.1.1.  The other programs are compiled by main using compile:c(ErlFile,
CompileOpts) where CompileOpts = [native, verbose, report_errors,
report_warnings, warn_unused_vars, {outdir,BeamDir}].

To my surprise, the machine still runs at just over 10000 actions per sec.
I had hoped that HiPE would be faster than the BEAM emulator.  Neither the
HiPE 1.0.2 user's manual nor the Technical reference 0.99.0 make any claim
for improved speed.

Should HiPE be faster than the BEAM emulator?

Best Regards,
Roger