Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!rutgers!labrea!decwrl!pyramid!prls!mips!earl
From: earl@mips.UUCP (Earl Killian)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: What with these Vector's anyways?
Message-ID: <556@gumby.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 1-Aug-87 15:08:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: gumby.556
Posted: Sat Aug  1 15:08:12 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Aug-87 02:31:08 EDT
References: <218@astra.necisa.oz> <142700010@tiger.UUCP> <363@astroatc.UUCP> <2425@ames.arpa>
Lines: 32
Keywords: benchmarks, Dhrystone, sorting
Summary: a correction

I was hoping someone would respond to the Cray dhrystone message.
Hugh LaMaster's reply seemed right on the mark to me.  I did want to
clarify one thing, however.  And, I'll end by suggesting two integer
benchmarks we could use to replace dhrystone.

In article <2425@ames.arpa>, lamaster@pioneer.arpa (Hugh LaMaster) writes:
> ...
> MIPS computers, and others, have been tending to use Un*x utilities
> to measure the "general purpose" speed of machines.

MIPS Computer uses Unix utilities (nroff, diff, grep, yacc) as one
component in our performance analysis.  For example, we devote 1 page
of our 20 page performance brief to those four.  While these are ten
times better than dhrystone for estimating performance, they still
overestimate our performance slightly, we believe.  For example, using
just nroff we would call our m/1000 11.7x a 780 instead of 10x at 780.
Internally, we use several phases of our compiler for rating integer
performance, since they are the largest and nastiest things we can
find.  The C front-end (one of our worst) gets as slow as 9.0x a 780
because it cache misses a lot.  Of course, our compilers aren't
something we can give out as a standard benchmark.  So, in a future
brief we will add espresso (PLA reduction) and timber wolf (routing by
simulated annealing) as large integer program benchmarks (well, timber
wolf does a little floating point).  People with integer cad
applications can probably relate to these, just as an average Unix
site can probably relate to using text processing and compiling as
benchmarks.  Perhaps espresso and timber wolf can become good general
purpose benchmarks, even for non-Unix machines?  Are there better
choices of real programs?

Fortunately, for floating point there is no shortage of decent
benchmarks.