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	(4.1/9.4jsm) id AA19299; Fri, 28 Dec 90 10: 23:21 EST
From: mikes@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Michael Squires)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.benchmarks
Subject: Re: Dhrystone/SPEC Correlational Analysis?
Summary: simple to do; where's the data?
Keywords: comparisons
Message-ID: <1990Dec28.102326.19316@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 28 Dec 90 15:23:18 GMT
References: <1990Dec28.043824.28267@world.std.com>
Organization: Computer Science, Indiana University, Bloomington
Lines: 28

In article <1990Dec28.043824.28267@world.std.com> bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes:
>Is anyone aware of any correlative analysis (statistical methods)
>comparing Dhrystone to SPEC. In particular, to what extent one is or
>isn't a predictor of the other?

This would be fairly simple to do.  Where would I find the data?

At this point are there non-proprietary benchmarks that are useful (in the
sense that a single user could obtain and run the benchmark without having
to pay more than access costs for the sources)?  I personally find the
Dhrystone to be useful since I use the same code on all the machines that
I test, and there is an excellent relationship between the results and my
subjective evaluation of the hardware/software.  For example, the Dhrystone
showed me that I was getting sub-par performance from my 486/25 and the
manufacturer has accepted the motherboard for rework.  I didn't need the
AIM suite or the SPEC suite for this.

Things that I've seen/have:  Dhrystone 1.1 and 2; iobench2 (for testing
disk I/O); the old Byte UNIX benchmarks (I understand the disk I/O part
is faulty, gets fooled by caches); the Whetstone and Linpack floating
point benchmarks; the NCR System Characterization benchmark; and the Monash
University benchmark.  The Dhrystone, Whetstone, Byte, NCR, and Monash
sources were posted to various newsgroups.
-- 

Mike Squires (mikes@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu)     812 855 3974 (w) 812 333 6564 (h)
mikes@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu          546 N Park Ridge Rd., Bloomington, IN 47408
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