🚀 go-pugleaf

cmg@magnet.cray.com writes:
>      (NOTE: The performance above which is attributed to a CRAY-1 is
>      actually that of a CRAY S-MP, NOT a CRAY-1.

Yes, I screwed up. Sorry it bothered you: I hadn't posted a
correction, because that number wasn't important to my point.

>On this particular benchmark,
>we would see a 3x speed improvement attributable to software.
>The improvement of microprocessor speed of the past decade has been
>tremendous.  How much of this improvement is attributable to software?

We should get John Mashey to give us a graph of SPECmarks versus
time, chip held constant. Several chips (the 88100, for instance)
noticeably picked up speed this way.

In general, optimization has the most leverage on numerical
benchmarks, since their execution times are most likely dominated by
some smallish stretch of code. We would expect SPECint to have been
bent less than SPECfp. Of course, in real life, a lot of performance
is dominated by disk speeds and the like, so improved compiler
technology doesn't always play a role.
-- 
Don		D.C.Lindsay 	Carnegie Mellon Computer Science