Category: performance
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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 […]