🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Feb22.175317.12898@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> 
> In article <76700146@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
> >I don't disagree that you need to test a spectrum of operations; the
> >SPEC benchmark is good in this respect.  But keeping SPEC large is a
> >poor way to test for caching affects.
> 
> Why?  Most of the applications that people will be running are similarly
> large.  Surely the way to test for caching effects on large programs is
> to run large programs?


i dont really disagree with what henry says, but i would like to point
out not all real programs are large and not all large programs need to
have large caches.

i am sure there _are_ real programs that can fit entirely in the 68030's
massive (:-) 256 byte data and instruction caches.  i am sure there
are a lot more real programs that can fit entirely in a 8k cache.  i
am sure that a lot of real programs will fit nicely in 32k-128k
caches.  i dont think it is necessary nor is it correct to make your
benchmarks bust every sized cache.

i think the SPEC approach is correct.  use real programs that need a
reasonable range of cache requirements, and let the user be the judge
as to whether the SPECmark is applicable to the real programs that
they want to run.



-wayne