Category: SPEC
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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…