Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!iuvax!pur-ee!a.cs.uiuc.edu!p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies
From: gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: missing Dhrystone 2.1 (1 of 3 &
Message-ID: <76700035@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 14 Jul 88 04:51:00 GMT
References: <4232@cbmvax.UUCP>
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Nf-ID: #R:cbmvax.UUCP:4232:p.cs.uiuc.edu:76700035:000:1301
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!gillies    Jul 13 23:51:00 1988


I certainly find it hard to believe that the top of the line Amdahl
machine achieves 90,000+ Dhrystones with an experimental gnu C
compiler.  It nearly doubles the performance of the best Cray compiler
reported (admittedly, compiling C for a Cray is probably hard, but
Crays are very decent scaler machines!  sheesh).

Maybe BYTE's new benchmarks are more fair.  What we need is a
MEGASTONE or perhaps an ANSIIstone benchmark that tests nearly all the
standard i/o libraries and all the language functions of a compiler.
That would make it difficult to cheat, since the benchmark would be so
large, that it would be fruitless to concentrate on optimizations for
certain coding sequences, or fruitless to optimize just a handful of
library subroutines.

Dhrystone has never been a test of processor MIPS -- this month's ACM
SIGPLAN states that it is intended to measure:

	The performance of "real" Operating System code.

I think it's about time we started benchmarking the architecture +
compiler together.  Compiler researchers have got their sh*t together,
so we may as well throw them into the performance rat-race!


Don Gillies, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois
1304 W. Springfield, Urbana, Ill 61801      
ARPA: gillies@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP: {uunet,ihnp4,harvard}!uiucdcs!gillies