Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!hcx1!tom From: tom@ssd.csd.harris.com (Tom Horsley) Newsgroups: comp.sys.m88k Subject: Re: DG's use of m88k Message-ID: Date: 21 Feb 90 16:08:00 GMT References: <7521@imag.imag.fr> Sender: news@hcx1.SSD.CSD.HARRIS.COM Organization: Harris Computer Systems Division Lines: 39 In-reply-to: despoix@imag.imag.fr's message of 20 Feb 90 13:26:35 GMT In article <7521@imag.imag.fr> despoix@imag.imag.fr (Frederic DESPOIX) writes: > Benchmark numbers are relative to VAX 11/780 = 1.0, so higher numbers are > better. The programs gcc, espresso, spice, doduc, nasa7, ll, eqntolt, > matrix300, fpppp and tomcatv are real programs, not synthetic or toy codes. > The SPECmark is the geometric mean of the ten benchmark programs (the Nth > root of the product of the membmers of a list with 10 members). If you believe that all these benchmarks are real programs and not toys you have been reading SPEC literature, not the benchmark source. Matrix300 spends 99.99% of its cycles in a single line of code, even Whetstone is a better benchmark than this. Espresso is not much better, spending 90% of its time in the compare routine it passes to qsort(). > If someone could supply more information about each benchmark, and each > system (cache size, CPU clock rate, etc), that might prove enlightening. There are lots of different clock rates/cache sizes/compilers out there. This is the information you are supposed to pay hundreds of dollars to get from SPEC. One thing that is worth noting is that ALL of the floating point benchmarks are strictly double precision, and double precision is somewhat slow on the 88100 architecture implementation because internal paths are only 32 bits wide. There are quite a lot of applications areas that do not need double precision (graphics processing is often a good example, when you only need to map images onto a screen 1000 pixels wide, double precision is overkill). The SPEC benchmark suite needs to have at least one or two single precision benchmarks added to give it a better balance. (I am quite aware that there are also applications requiring double precision, I just want to see some single precision numbers in SPEC, don't tell me I claimed no one need double precision). -- ===================================================================== domain: tahorsley@ssd.csd.harris.com USMail: Tom Horsley uucp: ...!novavax!hcx1!tahorsley 511 Kingbird Circle or ...!uunet!hcx1!tahorsley Delray Beach, FL 33444 ======================== Aging: Just say no! ========================