Category: performance
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Maximum Adds per second for 1950s/early 1960s computers
Relative digital computer performance has been measured, since the mid-1960s, by timing how long it takes to execute one or more programs. Until the early 1990s Whetstone was widely used, and then SPEC brought things up to date. Running the same program on multiple computers requires that it be written in a language that is…
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Relative performance of computers since the 1990s
What was the range of performance of desktop’ish computers introduced since the 1990s, and what was the annual rate of performance increase (answers for earlier computers)? Microcomputers based on Intel’s x86 family was decimating most non-niche cpu families by the early 1990s. During this cpu transition a shift to a new benchmark suite followed a…
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CPU frequency not relevant to SPEC benchmark performance
Despite the end of Dennard scaling around 2005-7 computer performance, as measured by the SPEC cpu benchmarks, continues to improve. What is driving this ongoing increase in performance, given that cpu clock rates have stopped increasing? The plot below shows 9,161 results from the SPEC CPU integer benchmark, plus the fitted regression line (code+data): There…
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Memory bandwidth: 1991-2009
The Stream benchmark is a measure of sustained memory bandwidth; the target systems are high performance computers. Sustained in the sense of distance running, rather than a short sprint (the term for this is peak memory bandwidth and occurs when the requested data is in cache), and bandwidth in the sense of bytes of memory…