> Lets take a real world benchmark. On < $2000 of PC I can recompile the > entire Linux kernel in 3 minutes, and the entirity of XFree86 in 30. I > can saturate multiple 100Mbit links with web traffic. I can encode video > in real time to mpeg and burn it to VideoCD as I go. I can render > 1024x768 3D scenes with texture and lighting at 80frames/second. > > All of those happen to be useful to me. I think you misunderstand some > of the nature of the commodity processors.
No - you're a power user - the sort of person who would have gone out to buy a 387. Although there seem to be lots of power users about, that's because they inhabit similar places. A few thousand or a few tens of thousands at most - compared with tems of millions of processors shipped. > >> Performance measurement should be left to those who know what they're doing. The >first step > > is to define terms of measurement, and these must be related to real world and >real user > > issues, so that the results are relevant to their audience. > > Understand that the majority audience isn't interested in bit errors per > year, component failures per year, floor space per 100Mbyte/sec > throughput. They won't be until those features like the FPU become > economical using either hardware or software to drop into mainstream > cheap processor silicon. The trend is the other way. Major manufacturers are looking at simply overconfiguring by a large percentage and then disabling broken bits in software. Such machines will never be repaired. IBM's proposed 'Icecube' design almost precludes repair. > Why is that relevant - because the computing mainstream press > understands the computing mainstream. They care about desktop > performance properties (latency over throughput, price/performance, > etc). Getting them to think in other terms is hard, especially when any > attempt to get public IBM comparisons that are third party verified is > hitting a wall of silence. I don't see that as an issue. IBM has established comparative benchmarks between its own products - if you have one, you can relate it to other similar products. LSPR is the best example, though even there things like buffer pool redefinitiuons tend to blur the numbers. But who should verify and who arbitrate over the inevitable arguments? -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.com +44 7785 302 803 +49 173 6242039
