Sun Ultra 10 440MHz with 320MB RAM with Solaris 7 running Perl 5.6.0:

Benchmark: timing 1000000 iterations of Grep, Max, Ternary...
      Grep:  9 wallclock secs ( 8.85 usr +  0.00 sys =  8.85 CPU) @ 11
+2994.35/s (n=1000000)
       Max: 12 wallclock secs (12.10 usr +  0.00 sys = 12.10 CPU) @ 82
+644.63/s (n=1000000)
   Ternary: 12 wallclock secs (12.17 usr +  0.00 sys = 12.17 CPU) @ 82
+169.27/s (n=1000000)
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Update: I killed a few processes, exited X and so on... Got this result:

Benchmark: timing 1000000 iterations of Grep, Max, Ternary...
      Grep:  5 wallclock secs ( 5.32 usr +  0.00 sys =  5.32 CPU) @ 18
+7969.92/s (n=1000000)
       Max:  9 wallclock secs ( 8.64 usr +  0.00 sys =  8.64 CPU) @ 11
+5740.74/s (n=1000000)
   Ternary:  8 wallclock secs ( 8.63 usr +  0.01 sys =  8.64 CPU) @ 11
+5740.74/s (n=1000000)
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