U. Glaeser

TABLE 4.4
Electric signals are slower than light. This means that the dimensions that a signal must travel within a clock
cycle are very small, and almost certainly must be within a single integrated circuit package to achieve results
within a single cycle.
Computer systems, which exceed the processing performance of the fastest microprocessor, must use
multiple processors in parallel. Multiple processors on a single chip are starting to appear [46]. PCs with
multiple processors are becoming more frequent, and many operating systems support multiprocessor
operation. The largest computers [47] are collections, or clusters of processors.
Measuring Processor Performance
No single number can accurately represent the performance of a processor. But, there is a need to have
such a number for general comparisons [48].
Processor performance was originally measured by the time required to add two numbers [49,50]. In
1966, Knight [51] built a more complex model to compare 225 computers starting with the Harvard
Mark I. He generated performance measures for scientific applications and for commercial applications
and calculated price-performance information. His plots showed the improving price-performance with
time. Other early approaches to measuring performance included benchmarks, synthetic programs,
simulation, and the use of hardware monitors [52].
Standard benchmark programs started to become popular for estimating performance with the creation
of the Whetstone benchmark in 1976 [53,54]. Other benchmark programs were widely used, such
as Dhrystone for integer performance [55] and the sieve of Eratosthenes [7] for simple microprocessor
performance.
Computerworld reported computer system performance and prices for many years [56–69]. The company’s
tables reported performances compared systems with standard computers, such as the IBM 360/50
[56,57] or IBM 370/158-3 [58–66]. The IBM 370/158-3 was roughly a 1 million instructions per second
(MIPS) machine. MIPS and MFLOPS were widely used as performance measures. But, MIPS and MFLOPS
are not well regarded due to the differences in what one instruction can perform on different systems.
Even the conversion between thousands of operations per second (KOPS) and MIPS is fuzzy [70].
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation was set up as a nonprofit consortium to develop good
benchmarks for computing applications [71]. The initial CPU performance benchmark, the SPECmark89,
used the VAX 11/780 performance as the base rating of 1 SPECmark. The benchmark consisted of several
integer and floating point oriented application program sections, selected to represent typical CPU usage.
The SPECmark was a geometric mean of the ratios of execution time taken on the target machine compared
with the base machine (VAX 11/780). This was an excellent quality benchmark for measuring CPU
© 2002 by CRC Press LLC
Features of Selected Intel Microprocessors
Year Processor Transistors
Die Size
(sq. mm) Cache on Chip Bits
Line Width
(microns)
Clock
(MHz)
Perf.
(MIPS)
1971 i4004 2.30E+
03 12 0 4 10 0.108 1.5E−03
1972 i8008 3.50E+
03 — 0 8 10 0.2 3.0E−03
1975 i8080A 6.00E+
03 14 0 8 6 2 2.8E−02
1978 i8086 2.90E+
04 — 0 16 3 10 5.7E−01
1982 i286 1.34E+
05 — 0 16 1.50 12 1.3E+
00
1985 i386DX 2.75E+
05 — 0 32 1.00 16 2.2E+
00
1989 i486DX 1.20E+
06 — 8K 32 1.00 25 8.7E+
00
1993 Pentium 3.10E+
06 296 8KI/8KD 32 0.80 66 6.4E+
01
1995 Pentium Pro 5.50E+
06 197 8KI/8KD 32 0.35 200 3.2E+
02
1997 Pentium II 7.50E+
06 203 16KI/16KD 32 0.35 300 4.5E+
02
1999 Pentium III 9.50E+
06 125 16KI/16KD 32 0.25 500 7.1E+
02
2000 Pentium IIIE 2.80E+
07 106 16KI/16KD+
256K 32 0.18 933 1.7E+
03
2000 Pentium 4 4.20E+
07 217 12KI/8KD+
256K 32 0.18 1500 2.5E+
03
2001 Itanium 2.50E+
07 — 16KI/16KD+
96K+
4M 64 0.18 800 2.6E+
03