( ESNUG 272 Item 1 ) -------------------------------------------- [11/19/97]
Subject: Homegrown EDA Benchmarks from INDUSTRY GADFLY "Drool, Drool, Drool"
jcooley@world.std.com ( John Cooley ) wrote:
>
> It was in this climate of intimidation that I learned from an old Motorola
> CAD manager how to make homebrew, quick & dirty EDA benchmarks. "To
> compare workstations for EDA purposes, take 70 percent of its integer SPEC
> mark and 30 percent of its floating point SPEC mark, normalize it, and
> you'll know how they relatively stand for most Cadence and Synopsys tools."
>
> Workstation SPECint SPECfp 70/30 Normalized
> ----------- ------- ------ ----- ----------
> DEC Alpha 15.22 24.22 17.92 2.14
> HP J282-XP 10.80 17.20 12.72 1.52
> Sun Ultra 30 10.20 16.20 12.00 1.43
> SGI Octane 10.50 7.00 10.63 1.27
> IBM RS6000 43P 9.40 5.99 8.38 1.00
From: silbey@colnago.engr.sgi.com (Alex Silbey)
John, not that it makes that much of a difference (since SGI isn't in the
EDA market), but the correct specint95 and specfp95 for the SGI Octane are
9.4 and 17.4, respectively. That changes the 70/30 score to 11.7 and the
normalized score to 1.396.
The Origin 2000 has specint and fp numbers of 11.4 and 19.1, for a 70/30
score of 13.6 and a normalized score of 1.62.
Data is from "http://www.sgi.com/Octane/products/benchmarks/index.html" and
"http://www.sgi.com/Headlines/1997/November/mipspro_release.html"
- Alex Silbey
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
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From: Curtis McAllister <curtismc@cup.hp.com>
John,
Well, it was a courageous attempt at keeping yourself out of hot water, but
you failed nonetheless. You didn't mention HP's highest performance
workstation -- the HP Visualize Model C240. It has a SPECint95 number of
17.3 and a SPECfp95 number of 25.4 -- giving it a normalized 70/30 score of
2.35! More information on this product can be found on HP's web site at
http://www.hp.com/wsg/launch/products/cclassspec.html
To be fair to you, I thought that maybe this product wasn't listed on the
SPEC web site, but a quick search of the SPEC site showed that it was indeed
listed. Here's what I did to show all products that you might be interested
in viewing:
1. Go to the SPEC query page:
http://www.specbench.org/cgi-bin/osgresults?conf=cpu95
2. Under "Other Requests" select the link
"Configurable Query form in HTML3.2 Tables"
3. In the "CPU95 Results -- Form", I specified my criteria as the
following:
Request
Criteria
Result is greater than 9
HW Avail is since Jan-96
Ordering
1.Company
2.Result
3.System
I then got a table for all CINT95 results listed by manufacturer, followed
by all CFP95 results, etc.
- Curtis McAllister
Hewlett-Packard Co.
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From: Shiv Sikand <sikand@mti.mti.sgi.com>
John,
Don't know where you got your numbers for the SGI Octane. If you check:
ftp://ftp.cdf.toronto.edu/pub/spectable, you will observe that the Spec
numbers for an Octane with 195 MHz R10K are 9.3 Int and 17.0 FP.
Either way, your numbers are self inconsistent in the SGI row.
Cheers,
- Shiv Sikand
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
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From: anderson@acuson.com (Brien Anderson)
Hi John,
Gosh *thanks* for the homebrew benchmark formula. But do they still port
Synopsys tools onto the DEC Alpha platform?
- Brien Anderson
Acuson
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From: BRIAN_W_LOWE@HP-USA-om31.om.hp.com ( Brian Lowe )
John,
Interesting & informative article. In fairness to Sun (from their web page)
I believe the Ultra 30 comes in at 1.67 normalized, up from 1.43 (12.1
specint95 and 18.3 specfp95). However the competitor from HP to this box is
the C240 which from HP's web page (www.hp.com/go/technical) comes in at 2.35
normalized (17.3 specint95 and 25.4 specfp95) placing it ahead of DEC.
- Brian Lowe
Hewlett-Packard Co.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: Jerry Case <jacase@ix.netcom.com>
So John,
Do you have the numbers for the Pentium II for comparison?
- Jerry Case
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: "Wilbur Harvey" <wnh@sinewave.com>
John,
One thing which is often not understood, is that in many EDA applications,
such as PCB routing and most logic simulations, the primary performance
factor is *memory bandwidth* and not CPU performance. Most modern CPU's
have cycle times much faster than main memory access so in most situations
where lots of memory is what you need, you also need the best memory bandwith
possible.
I did some tests a couple of years ago w/ a DEC Alpha used for PCB routing.
On a 1 hour route, increasing the L2 cache size by a factor of 4 slowed down
the route by 6 seconds (the larger cache had one extra wait state),
increasing the clock speed from 166Mhz to 233Mhz decreased the route time
by 3 seconds and removing a wait state from DRAM accesses decreased the
route time by about the amount of time that overall memory performance was
increased.
This is one reason which relatively slow Pentium systems with SDRAM perform
so well, and why the new Alpha systems using 128Bit wide SDRAM accesses have
benchmarked so well in PCB routing.
- Wilbur Harvey
Sinewave
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