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Your Chance To Influence CPU Benchmarking
John Henning writes "When comparing CPUs, is it enough to look at MHz? Of course not; architecture matters, as do caches, memory systems, and compilers. Perhaps the best-known vendor-neutral CPU performance comparison is from SPEC, but SPEC plans to retire its current CPU benchmarks. If you would like to influence the benchmarks that will replace the current set, time is running out: SPEC Search Program entries are due by midnight, June 30."
Researchers in compiler optimizations usually use SPEC benchmarks to test how their optimizations do. This keeps them from cooking up programs that their optimizations do really well on ("Our optimization results in a bajillion percent increase on this program!!"), though of course it encourages them to cook up optimizations that do really well on SPEC benchmarks. That's why the benchmarks are supposed to be "real world" programs, as much as possible.
This has been true for me since the Pentium 100MHz or so. However, demands change. My current computer has a 1.8GHz PIV. While I would gladly trade that for a 1GHz PIII, I would not go for anything less. In a few years this computer too will seem impossibly slow and useless.
The only thing that is new is that high-end gamers now spend more on their graphics cards than on their CPUs. That is truly a change, and it would scare me a lot if I was Intel or AMD. The inside joke at nVidia is that GPU is short for General Processor Unit, while CPU is short for Compatible Processor Unit. Imagine a day when all performance critical software runs on the GPU, while the CPU is reduced to handling I/O and legacy applications...
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
GCC is one of the SPEC benchmarks, and the speed of running GCC matter a lot, judging by the flames about slow compile times after GCC 3.0 was released.
All the SPEC programs are supposed to be real applications which represent classes of problems real people cares about, allthough some of the floating point benchmarks may fall short of that.
Basides who cares about what 95% of the population needs. And who, beside you, cares about what you want. SPEC was never intended for "95% of the population", it was intended for high end enginering and scientific users. It was never intended for people whose main use of their computer is to write letters to their mom, surf for porno, and occasionally edit a spreadsheet.
And this is development section of site called "news for nerds", not the leisure section of a luser magazine. We are supposed to be either developers ourself, or at least technofiles enough to realise that faster cmputers open up for ebitrely new applications areas.