🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <astroatc.392> philm@astroatc.UUCP (Phil Mason) writes:
>In article <1774@gitpyr.UUCP> kludge@gitpyr.UUCP (Scott Dorsey) writes:
>>In article <384@astroatc.UUCP> philm@astroatc.UUCP (Phil Mason) writes:
>>>
>>>Power is defined to be the time rate at which work is done.  That leaves us
>>>in a little bit of a quandry.  What is a unit of work for computer systems?
>>>It must be related to how the CPU affects the information it processes.
>>
>>   Your analogy with earlier machines is quite apt, except that it must be
>>pointed out that, as mechanical devices do not all perform the same tasks,
>>neither do computers perform the same tasks.
>>    Computing power CANNOT be measured in one scalar number.
>>-- 
>
>Yes, I agree.  I didn't say it was going to be easy.
>
>Let's look at it this way. There are a number of generic information processing
>functions that a computer performs : Floating point, Integer, Program
>control flow and I/O operations. There are also subdivisions of these tasks
>according to the size and type of the operands (i.e., scalar, vector, array -
>8, 16, 32, 64+ bits etc.). 

Is performance on a particular program likely to be measurable as a linear 
combination of figures of merit for these tasks?  For example, suppose you
had a "MIPS"-like figure for floating point (FP), integer arithmetic (I), 
and looping (L).   Suppose in some program running on a particular data set
there were nfp FP instructions, ni, I instructions and nl times looping took 
place.  Could we say, then, that

	performance on this program with this data set =
		nfp*FP + ni*I + nl*L					?

What I really mean is, is there a list of "fundamental operations" which
would constitute a such a linear space for performance, applicable to all
or most machines?  Or is the problem essentially non-linear?   

Peter S. Shenkin	 Columbia Univ. Biology Dept., NY, NY  10027
{philabs,rna}!cubsvax!peters		cubsvax!peters@columbia.ARPA