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From: lm@snafu.Sun.COM (Larry McVoy)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: SPECmarks
Message-ID: <132232@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 26 Feb 90 02:39:41 GMT
References: <7393@pdn.paradyne.com> <3300102@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <36438@mips.mips.COM>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: lm@sun.UUCP (Larry McVoy)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 27

>In article <3300102@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
> [doesn't like SPEC]

In article <36438@mips.mips.COM> mash@mips.COM (John Mashey) writes:
>I'm sad to hear that what we've done so far is "no better than Dhrystone",
>because if that's true, a whole bunch of us have wasted, in toto, at
>least several million $ to try to do something better....

I, for one, think SPEC is great.  We use it a lot in house for
performance tuning.  I get warm fuzzies because I can look at N
different machines as measured by SPEC and the numbers ``make sense''
to me; SPEC seems to do a good job of measuring performance in a
machine independent manner.

On the other hand, SPEC is not the end all to beat all.  No benchmark
is.  If I could design the ideal benchmark, I'd design something that
had a bunch of knobs that I could turn, like an I/O knob, a CPU knob, a
memory knob, etc.  I don't have this, so I run several different
benchmarks that measure these sorts of things.  SPEC is one, Musbus is
another, and we have several internal/proprietary benchmarks as well.
Some people don't like you to quote one figure from one benchmark - I
like to see all the figures from all the benchmarks.  The more data you
have the easier it is to weed out the spikes.
---
What I say is my opinion.  I am not paid to speak for Sun, I'm paid to hack.
    Besides, I frequently read news when I'm drjhgunghc, err, um, drunk.
Larry McVoy, Sun Microsystems     (415) 336-7627       ...!sun!lm or lm@sun.com