🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4dgq46$so5@news.csus.edu>, will_yu@sfsu.edu (WILLIAM C YU) wrote:

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> Earth to Chad. The Spec benchmarks have never been an accurate 
> representation of real world work for any architecture. What the Spec 
> numbers show is the maximum theoretical performance of a machine.

Uh, I think what they really show is how hard the vendor is willing to
work in order to look good on SPEC. That performance may, or may not, have
any relationship to performance on other code.

Nice how everyone is still avoiding the key question: Why does P6 look
twice as fast as a 604 on SPEC (tests run by Intel on Intel reference
hardware with an Intel reference compiler), while on Bytemarks, which are
tests that can be run independently by anyone, the 604 is almost twice as
fast at P6!!

Here is one idea: Why don't the good folks at Intel run the Byte tests
with their nice "reference" hardware and "reference" compiler and post the
results on  the Intel web site? Then we would know several things: (1) Is
the reference hardware/software good for anything other than SPEC? (2) How
fast/fancy is the reference hardware compared to, say, the HP P6 machines
will Watcom (or pick your own favorite) C compiler. This would be a useful
thing to do. As best I can tell, no one but Intel can do this, because no
one else has the reference hardware and compiler!