Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!oliveb!Ricerca!chase
From: chase@Ricerca.orc.olivetti.com (David Chase)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: i860 Dhrystones
Keywords: i860 N10 Floating Point Dhrystones
Message-ID: <39388@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Date: 17 Mar 89 06:15:34 GMT
Sender: news@oliveb.olivetti.com
Reply-To: chase@Ricerca.UUCP (David Chase)
Organization: Olivetti Research Center, Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 20

In article <955@masscomp.UUCP> hanko@masscomp.UUCP (Jim Hanko) writes:
>Although strcpy is extensively called with string constants in
>Dhrystone, this is relatively rare in real programs.  Therefore, such a
>compiler feature seems to be targeted specifically to Dhrystone. 
>
>I think it would clearly be unfair to compare Dhrystone numbers where this
>trick was used to those where a strcpy subroutine was called. 

Get real.  Nobody with a half a brain should trust silly little
benchmark programs that reduce performance to a single number.
Develop benchmarks based on real code that does real work, and perhaps
compiler writers will target will target all those "unfair"
optimizations at code that people actually use.  Procedure inlining is
"not in the spirit of Dhrystone", but it would be stupid not to use it
for real programs if it was reasonably implemented.

When I want to compare processors, I run the programs that I use every
day.  The one that works best on those is the one that works best for me.

David