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An in-depth look at computer performance growth

An in-depth look at computer performance growth It is a common belief that computer performance growth is over 50% annually, or that performance doubles every 18-20 months. By analyzing publicly available results from the SPEC integer (CINT) benchmark suites, we conclude that this was true between 1985 and 1996 -- the early years of the RISC paradigm.During the last 7.5 years (1996-2004), however, performance growth has slowed down to 41%, with signs of a continuing decline. Meanwhile, clock frequency has improved with about 29% annually. The improvement in clock frequency was enabled both by an annual device speed scaling of 20% as well as by longer pipelines with a lower gate-depth in each stage. This paper takes a fresh look at -- and tries to remove the confusion about -- performance scaling that exists in the computer architecture community. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Association for Computing Machinery

An in-depth look at computer performance growth

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References (16)

Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
0163-5964
DOI
10.1145/1055626.1055646
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

It is a common belief that computer performance growth is over 50% annually, or that performance doubles every 18-20 months. By analyzing publicly available results from the SPEC integer (CINT) benchmark suites, we conclude that this was true between 1985 and 1996 -- the early years of the RISC paradigm.During the last 7.5 years (1996-2004), however, performance growth has slowed down to 41%, with signs of a continuing decline. Meanwhile, clock frequency has improved with about 29% annually. The improvement in clock frequency was enabled both by an annual device speed scaling of 20% as well as by longer pipelines with a lower gate-depth in each stage. This paper takes a fresh look at -- and tries to remove the confusion about -- performance scaling that exists in the computer architecture community.

Journal

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture NewsAssociation for Computing Machinery

Published: Mar 1, 2005

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