How fast is your computer?

[relsoft]

Ok, why can't they just say:

Here is the ops/second for
logic operation A
logic operation B
logic operation C
here is the average based on an industry standard of how many times each operation is used:

kool suggestion.

"there are always 3 sides to the story.... the Right, the Wrong and the Rel"

[DrV]

That would be too confusing for all the people who can't turn on a computer without a "quickstart guide" to find the power button...

[na_th_an]

Bah, people never RTFM

[red_Marvin]

I dont know where I saw hit but:

If nothing else works, read the instructions...

[Piptol]

Ok, why can't they just say:

Here is the ops/second for
logic operation A
logic operation B
logic operation C
here is the average based on an industry standard of how many times each operation is used:

For one thing, there would be huge disagreement about which ops they should measure. As it is, Intel and AMD already prioritse CPU optimisations differently. And then the manufacturers could start 'cheating' by optimising their CPUs for those operations that were going to be measured.

[wizardlife]

And then the manufacturers could start 'cheating' by optimising their CPUs for those operations that were going to be measured.

You're absolutely right. ATI already did that -- optimizing the Radeon series for the Quake3 engine.

[LooseCaboose]

he mistakenly considered the mHz count as a sign of speed

Very true, a vast many things above and beyond the mHz value contribute to the speed of a cpu/computer. Caches play a huge role in cpu speed, once a typical application is up and running it tends to access memory on less than 1% memory operations, the rest of the time it comes from the cache. The size and speed, whether they are split instruction/data, their replacement rules (write-back/write-allocate etc) and placement (L1, L2 and L3) all contribute to the percieved speed of a processor.

Other influences include pipeline design (separating the fetch, decode and execute operations), superscalar architectures which have multiple units such as the ALU so that more than one instruction can be executed at once, bus width and also how many components use the system bus (RIMMS provide very high speed memory by using a dedicated multiline, at the cost of a specific motherboard and lots of money).

RISC vs CISC design is an interesting one which has been the bain of the x86 line all along. RISC cpus typically provide a large number of general purpose registers (fast) and have fixed length instructions (quick to decode), whereas CISC cpus have fewer, more specific purpose registers (the x86 uses the stack to pass function arguments, while most RISC cpus pass arguments in registers for example), CISC instructions often take more cycles to execute than their RISC counterparts. The newer x86 cpus are designed with a CISC frontend and a faster RISC core (needless to say the time taken to convert from one to the other is a speed hit, but is better than doing everything in CISC fashion).

The Intel IA-64 architecture has some very cool advancements including instruction bundles. Instruction bundles are groups of three instructions which are identified by the assembler as safe to execute together (mutually independant), the IA-64 has three fetchers, decoders and executers which act in parallel on the bundles which basically allows one cpu to act as three (although you cant always bundle instructions, so some bundles may contain nops). It is slowly dawning on cpu manufacturers that the mHz value isnt everything and that alternative speed enhancements are the future (which is why AMD dont put the mHz speed in their processor names).

On top of all that your choice of operating system matters (what good is 256mb ram if XP needs ~270 at boot?). If I had my way I would have an Alpha DEC running optomized Gentoo Linux, but until then Ive got a humble old:
1Ghz AMD Athlon.
512mb ram
8mb nVidia TNT.
20gb harddrive (two OSes on it and still got space to burn).
Onboard sound (who on earth buys a highcost soundcard and then uses it to listen to mp3's with, Ive got a record player for music and I cant care less for games)
Windows 98 and RedHat Linux 7.1 dual booted.

And my other machine:
100 mHz powerPC processor.
Full SCSI peripherals
64mb ram
~10gb harddrive space (its got about 4 harddrives so I have /usr, /boot, /home etc all mounted on separate drives).
DAT drive which takes 4/8gb tapes.
Running Debian PowerPC Linux (console only).

My flatmate has a flash new 2gHz P4 thing (which still wont play Battlefield 1942 smoothly at full detail) and we have a couple of lower end Pentiums lying around in various states of repair. All in all I think we have ample computing power.