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From: johnw@astroatc.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 01/31/87 Dhrystone Results and Source
Message-ID: <149@astroatc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Feb-87 16:00:36 EST
Article-I.D.: astroatc.149
Posted: Tue Feb 17 16:00:36 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 18-Feb-87 20:11:53 EST
References: <2348@homxb.UUCP> <15203@onfcanim.UUCP>
Reply-To: johnw@astroatc.UUCP (John F. Wardale)
Organization: Astronautics Technology Cntr, Madison, WI
Lines: 37
Keywords: Benchmark, performance measurement


No, it is not possible to get a single figure of merit benchmark!

IBM has realized this for years and almost always quotes separate
comparison figures for "scientific" and "business" code.  Floating
point a side, the IBM-business benchmarks have a higher density of
tests and branches.  (Like Dhrystone, the IBM b-marks are tuned to
try to match sets of real applications)  Given the two IBM-figures,
one can usually make a good guess as to how much performace boost
was achived from a faster clock, and how much was from increased
pipelining.

A Second comment:
I think there's nothing wrong with a "compiler" that "figures out"
what the program does and generates a direct call to "printf" but
if this is used, them it all fairness, I would insist that the
compile time also be included in its timing!!!
--> Are there any times of **COMPILE** time used to compile
	d-stones for each of the machies?!

	(I saw a comparison of Mac compilers, and the slowest produced
	 the fastest running code, but I'd still rather have the
	 fastest compiler, which happened to produce fairly reasonable
	 code too! -- I know it wasn't the slowest code!!!)
	 Anyway, how important is a 2:3 (or 9:10) ratio anyway?????


			John W

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Name:	John F. Wardale
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