14 Feb
2007
14 Feb
'07
4:27 a.m.
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Speaking of Dhrystones.... what is one?
There is no "one". Like most benchmarks, Dhrystone is best used as a
means of measuring performance differences in like environments (ie. "I
increased the clock speed and now I get XX more dhrystones" or "I
optimized the compiler and got a few more dhrystones", etc.). It is not
a platform-agnostic absolute measure.
Also, what does the MHz, or GHz, measure
exactly?
The number of machine cycles per second.
I understand MIPS (Million Instructions Per
Second), FLOPS (Floating-point Operations Per
Second) and G-FLOPS (Giga-FLOPS) but the
aforementioned two are a mystery to me.
Well, I don't like MIPS that much for the same reasons outlined in my
first paragraph. For example, most 6502 instructions run in fewer
clocks than like instructions in 8088, but 8088 has 16-bit operations
for "free"... etc.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
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