Adecvax.204
net.works
utzoo!decvax!minow
Wed Apr 14 18:56:28 1982
Re: another view of mips
One problem with published benchmarks, such as Wheatstone's, is that
less than honorable vendors might try to tune their compiler/operating
system to the benchmark. There are reports of such things happening
for Fortran compilers and the Wheatstone benchmark, by the way.
When Dec first announced Fortran-IV-PLUS and the 11/70 at Hannover
(1974 or 1975), someone went around to all the vendors with a
Fortran benchmark. The 11/70 ran it in zero time. Turned out to
be a loop like:
X = 0
DO 10 I=1, 100
DO 10 J=1, 100
10 X = X + 1
Fortran-IV-PLUS did the entire computation at compile-time, generating
I = 101
J = 101
X = 10000
exit
The person running the benchmark accepted it as valid.
Moral: benchmarks -- especially computational ones -- are generally
unrepresentative of situations where the customer asks "How many users
can I put on my ..." (correction: "where the customer really wants to
know...")
Martin Minow
decvax!minow
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