Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uflorida!gatech!utkcs2!de5 From: de5@ornl.gov (Dave Sill) Newsgroups: comp.benchmarks Subject: Re: Calculating MIPS Message-ID: <1990Nov16.143032.3451@cs.utk.edu> Date: 16 Nov 90 14:30:32 GMT References: <1990Nov16.080815@mathcs.emory.edu> Sender: news@cs.utk.edu (USENET News System) Reply-To: Dave Sill Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory Lines: 18 In article <1990Nov16.080815@mathcs.emory.edu>, km@mathcs.emory.edu (Ken Mandelberg) writes: >Exactly how do you calculate the MIPS rating of a processor? Is it derived >directly from the instruction set and cycle timings, or is it more empirical? It's worse than either of those approaches. What passes for a MIPS these days is really a "VAX dhrystone equivalent". If you assume that a 780 is a 1 MIPS machine, and run a dhrystone benchmark on it, you get a number, e.g., 1750 dhrystones/sec. (Ignoring the variations due to compiler, OS, dhrystone versions, system load and configuration) The you run (presumably) the same dhrystone benchmark on your system and divide its result by the VAX result. What you get is "MIPS". And Eugene thinks SPECmarks are bad... -- Dave Sill (de5@ornl.gov) Martin Marietta Energy Systems Workstation Support