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Hardware

Why Do We Still Use Clock Frequencies? 45

Posted by Cliff from the when-a-number-loses-its-meaning-as-a-measure dept.
Mr. Sketch asks: "With all the multiple pipelines, prefetching, caching, etc., that goes on in modern the (Bogo?)MIPS be a more accurate measure of a processors speed? If this is the case why don't chip manufacturers rate and advertise their chips with the MIPS value speed, but it seems like nowadays the MHz value is pretty much meaningless and we (as well as chip manufacturers) need to be using something else to get an accurate measure of the speed of a processor." I agree that clock frequency is next to meaningless when it comes to discussing the real speed of today's processors, but would MIPS really be a better replacement?
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Why Do We Still Use Clock Frequencies? More

Why Do We Still Use Clock Frequencies?

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  • Presumably 11 is just a floating point error?
    1. "The computer [G4]is extremely sluggish compared to a $300 box I have win2k on". Your $300 (I assume US) Win2K box is faster then your Apple G4? Somehow I don't believe that statement, not at least as you've told it.
    2. "I have never had any problems installing a program like Office on any of my computers, whether Mac or Windows." *You* may have never had problems installing programs like Office on your machines, but clearly you've never worked in a large environment. Out in the big world we have lots of problems with application installs on Windows we don't see on Macs (mostly 'cause Mac programs tend not to litter the OS with bits of themselves.) We don't generally see these problems with virgin installs but with what I described: Upgrading from one version to the next. It's quite common for some part of a previous version to hang around & cause problems down the road.
    3. "Windows has a much less cumersome GUI". By what measure?
    4. "The computers [Windows] comes on are cheaper": Not always. When one compares a bare-bones no-name PC to a Mac sure they don't match but when one compares a name brand product like a Dell or a HP with a NIC, soundcard, decent monitor (Apple uses the high-quality Sony ones), FireWire/1394/iLink, etc. to a Mac then the margin is much closer. Apple is almost never cheaper but it's usually competitive.
    5. "Crashes a lot less". They both do. You can fight this back & forth but for uptime neither is great.
    6. "Even if you a die-hard Mac user use a PC for a week, they will complain that Windows is slow, ugly, and crashed more then Mac OS 9." I'm not a "die-hard Mac user" rather I'm an IS professionial who uses Mac, Windows boxes & a variety of other systems on a regular basis now & for the past 14 years. I like Mac sure, for some folks they're a great solution. I also manage 5000 Windows boxes and they're good at what they're used for. The same as there's no one-model-suits-all car there's no universal-PC-solution. I do agree that the default Windows interface is butt-ugly though.
    7. "a) People buy Macs because they are "cute" b) People buy Macs because they are the "fastest" c) People buy Macs because they are "easy to use". I think we blew away the "cute" point earlier. Faster, sure, for some things like PhotoShop, and easier to use, great! I see folks all day, intelligent people who use computers as integral to their jobs who can barely use their WinPCs. Yeah, I'll agree that Macs are somewhat easier to pick up if one's never seen a computer before. Tougher if one is used to Windows conventions but even then when going back & forth many folks do tend to prefer the Mac.
    8. Finally, most Mac users would understand the value of proof-reading, grammer-checking, formatting text for legibility, and of course how-to-spell-check. Consider learning how to do this on your $300 Win2k box.
  • HGTG defines the speed "R" as the fastest speed a sane person would want to travel, given an acceptable speed and not getting there more than, say, 5 minutes late.

    Arthur Dent thought that R17 was a bit too fast.
  • 1 HP == 745.5 watts, where watt == one newton meter per second. 1 HP == 550 foot-pounds per second.
    <O
    ( \
    XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!
  • acceptable risk I meant.
  • or, Marketing Instructions Per Second.
  • ...except that that is not monotonically increasing ;8)
    ~Tim
    --
    .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

  • For the love of god, don't use MIPS! (Score:4)

    by Dast ( 10275 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @12:29PM (#719003)

    Measuring the performance of machines is way to complicated of an issue to use something like a MIPS rating. Because MIPS factors out the instruction count needed to get something done, you can inflate your rating by doing a large load of useless instructions really quickly.

    MIPS = (InstructionCount) / (ExecutionTime *10^6)

    ExecutionTime = (InstructionCount * AvgClockCyclesPerInstr * CycleTime)

    The InstructionCount's cancel out, leaving

    MIPS = 1 / (AvgClockCyclesPerInstr * CycleTime *10^6)

    So if another computer can do the same amount of work with ten times less instructions, it doesn't show up in a MIPS rating.

    Measuring performance just isn't as simple as looking at a single numeric rating. Sometimes you are interested in measuring responsiveness, somtimes throughput, and a lot of it depends on the specific applications you want to run. Just asking "how fast" is a processor is almost meaningless.

    To my knowledge, the spec [specbench.org] benchmarks, while not free, are the best standardized benchmarks out there. For integer performance alone, it tests data compression (gzip and bzip I think), FPGA circuit placement, compiling c code, chess, running perl, ray tracing, database stuff, etc; I can't even remember all of the stuff it tests for floating point performance. Obviously, because it isn't free you probably won't be using it to test your home linux box, but if you are doing serious bench marks, the money would be worth it.

  • To paraphrase Patterson & Hennessy [fatbrain.com], No single number can ever encapsulate the speed of a system. Not MIPS, not MFLOPS, not specints. Any single test or single number can be artificially inflated, and this inflation probably won't carry over into general performance.
  • Cyrix used to have this nifty thing called PR (performance rating or processor rating or somesuch). Their marketingspeak was that a Cyrix PR-200 would outperform a Pentium class chip running at 200 MHz. I bought that line. But of course their PR system does not take into account the dismal performance of their FPU, particularly for games, and so I found my spankin' new PR200 can barely achieve speeds of a similarly equipped Pentium 133MHz. MHz does have its problems, but so far every example I've seen of "alternate ratings" just turn out to be a lot of marketingspeak.
  • I hate when the MHz is used to show a CPU speed... for example, the PPC G4 gets a bad deal because it is only 500 MHz, but in reality, it is MUCH faster then it's Intel/AMD counterparts.

    I should say I am refering to rhe RC5 speeds...

    http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/query.cgi?cpu type=all&arch=2&contest=rc5

    Peace out.

  • MIPS is a pretty unreliable means of measuring speed. Here are some reasons why:

    1) We're measuring instructions per second. No one's saying what the instruction IS. It could be a tiny one, could be a big one. Different instructions take different lengths of time.

    2) You could get around this by getting an average MIPS based on the frequency of use of the various instructions, but that would mean you couldn't compare two computers with different instructions.

    3) Some types of chips use longer instructions for efficiency. Now, technically, they are doing fewer instructions. But for all we know, those instructions could each be doing much more work than 1 "normal" instruction.

    Truth is, neither MIPS nor Clock Cycle are that good a judge of speed. Measurement is just plain hard.

  • And color. You can't forget color. I'd much rather have a red or silver car than a brown one. Besides, just look at the iMac.

  • *sniff*....*sniff*

    Hey, it smells like Hennessy and Patterson around here!

    (We'll see if the mods get that one)

    You're correct, of course.

  • Problem is, what small things could make a difference in buying a computer.

    I mean they all have the same OS.

    The only differences are RAM and processor.

    But Apple managed to sell computer based on cuteness.

  • We don't see cars advertised by horsepower, but we do for number of doors. And many shoppers do look at the number of cylinders, because it gives you some idea of the relative power -- if you're moving to "hilly" Colorado you'll choose the station wagon with 6-8 cylinders rather than 4.
  • We sold you cars this way, why not computers?

    The problem is, we don't see each other cars this way. You don't open a car magazine and see a bunch ads reading
    **240 HP!!!** $15999
    ***280 HP!!**** $18299
    !*!*!*! 300 HP!! WOW !*!*!*! $23929

    But that's exactly what computer magazines look like. If anything, it shows how unsophisticated the market for computers is, and that people are totally unaware of the 100s of small subjective things that actually sell things like cars.

    The only real solution for this is for CPUs to get so fast that the differences are irrelevant (are we there yet?), much like how car horse power ceased being important in the 1930s (and again in the 1990s) and people can focus on the non-quantifiable bits like reliablity, stablity, and maintainablity.
  • That's right, it's the application that matters. Technical people will consider a relevant benchmark -- a database benchmark is of no interest to someone who needs to run weeks of floating point calculations. And a floating point benchmark is the wrong test when you're doing integer math on 20 processors.

    Even then, only your own application is relevant. You might be doing multiple passes through an array -- but unfortunately you're sweeping memory addresses in a direction which is fast on one virtual memory system but requires a disk access for every calculation on another virtual memory system. (Yes, I've seen that happen.)

  • There have been a lot of good comments made by everyone, so I will only add a couple of my own.

    As others have said, speed is best-calculated as whole system speed. Not only the speed of the components (hard drive RPM, for example) but the technology and implementation of that technology is a factor.

    For example, is the hard drive 5400 or 10000?

    Is it IDE? If so, how large is the cache? What is the transfer rate?

    Even the fastest IDE will slow down a system with overhead, so lets talk SCSI.
    Which SCSI? SCSI, SCSI-II, Fast SCSI-II, Wide or Ultra or Ultrawide or U2W or UW160 or Fiber Channel or....

    Now, is it an elcheapo controller from CompUSA or is it a high-end busmastering controller? The difference is huge.

    Okay, that's a lot of data about the disk system. For a server or a workstation it will make a huge difference. But if I am just cracking SETI packets it will make almost no difference.

    See where I am going with this? There are too many variables to fit into any standard benchmark. The only decent way to test any computer is with your own software; the application you intend to be running.

    Failing that, the best way for me--sadly--is the MHz of the chip. Why? If it is a decent (Intel, High-end Asus, SuperMicro) MB, the speed will be about the same from system-to-system. Cheap computers all use IDE disks that I will just turn into .MP3 archives, and good computers usually all use the latest-and-greatest SCSI, often nice Adaptec controllers. The MHz of the chip gives me something to compare them with; two similar configuration machines will be about the same speed cycle-to-cycle. As long as it is the same brand and model CPU! This does not hold true for comparing a Laptop Pentium with a Pentium Pro, and comparing a Mac to an IBM is like comparing Apples to....you get the idea.

    For real applications (servers) or across different platforms (HP700 vs UltraSparc vs Origin vs Alpha), most buyers know what they are getting into and run decent tests on the boxen.

    Finally, for home users you can forget it; you can talk till you're blue in the face about why a Compaq DeskPro or Proliant will be faster than the $600 Compaq of the same MHz down at the local superstore, and they'll end up buying the $399 MediaGX E-machine anyway. Most home users only care about price. Change the 600Mhz sticker to 1200Mhz and they will swear it is faster...

    I've learned my lesson on that one.....

  • I seem to recall a video card maker that detected benchmarks being run on the card, and didn't do anything other then report it was did what was asked.

    Yes, and the first 3D video cards for home/office use were optimized for the (limited) kind of 3D stuff found in screen savers, rather than implementing all-round 3D acceleration. So Joe Blow could see that his fance new card made his cool 3D screen saver run really quickly, but it didn't say anything about what performance would be like with rendering or games or whatever.

  • Man that is so wrong & I'm so sick of hearing geeks say that as if it was received wisdom.

    iMacs don't sell 'cause they're 'cute'. Yeah, good design probably does enter into the equation (if you've gotta plunk down a couple grand for something that's gonna be in your living space would you prefer it look like a Singer sewing machine in it's case circa 1965 or something a bit more attractive?) but bang-for-the-buck they're decent machines.

    Whoa now, DON'T go spitting up MHz or bus speeds or any of that - that only matters to hardware jockeys & game freaks. To the average customer the iMac is an accessible, reasonably powerful computer running the popular Mac OS at a reasonably affordable price. That's what it offers and that's why they've been selling like hotcakes.

    It's not some damn Barbie clone walking into the store & squealing out "It's cuuute! I want one!" Nor is it Serge the designer saying "You must buy ze iMac - it goes with the Feng Shu of your home." At ~US$1500 a pop neither's a big market & it would have been exhausted long ago.

    You want an iMac customer? Take my Dad: Prof. Mike Maggard, if you ever study business odds are you'll use his textbook in OM, he's one of the guys who pioneered computers in business. Dad's got an iMac on his desk at home. Why? 'Cause it does what he wants. Reads his email, browse the net, look at the occasional Word or Excel file, low maintenance, always on, and luggable enough he can drag it to the summer house with no hassle.

    Problems with his iMac? None. It sits there quietly on it's table waiting to be used, when he moves the mouse it wakes up & is ready for action. Training to use it? None. At the university he has a WinNT PC and only wishes it was as reliable as his Mac.

    Installed MS Office 2001 the other day - what was involved? Insert CD with Office 2001. Drag old Office 98 folder to Trash. Drag new Office 2001 folder from CD to HD. Double-click on any app, answer a few questions, import email, all done. Repeat: ALL DONE. No installer app crap, no hassle, 1 minute (longest part was copying from the CD) and he's cleanly upgraded his entire primary applications suite. Do that in NT? Do that in Linux? Thought not. Folks who want their computing experience to be this frictionless like Mac & the tutti-frutti colors are a bonus.

  • A very good analogy (Score:3)

    by marcus ( 1916 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @11:27AM (#719017) Journal
    The basic reason is because the market is still young and immature. We used to talk about the number of barrels in a carb, cubic inches, rear end ratio, quarter-mile/0-60 times/speeds and so forth. These things are easy to measure, easy to quantify. Now we talk about handling qualities, anti-lock brakes, cubic-feet of cargo, etc. What happened was we got to the point where we actually knew how fast was fast enough and suddenly realized that there was more to making a good car than simply straight line accelleration.

    So...for now we talk about MHz, MIPs, MBs, GBs, bits in a bus, bandwidth, frame rates and so forth because they are easy to measure, easy to quantify, and we really don't know what it takes to make a good computer.

    In some places, mostly the embedded world, you hardly ever hear of MHz. Who cares how many MHz the proc inside your camera is? Unless of course you want to build a Beowolf cluster of cameras ;-)

    Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
  • Oh god please no.
    Most processor vendors use MIPS as a performance indicator. Unfortunately, MIPS is a misleading unit because of the varying amounts of work done by instructions on different processors. For example, the C62xx instruction execution rate of eight RISC-like instructions per clock cycle (1,600 MIPS at 200 MHz) cannot be directly compared to the MIPS performance of typical DSP processors. This is because a MAC operation consisting of one multiplication, one addition, and two address calculations is implemented as a single instruction on conventional DSP processors, but as three to four instructions on the C62xx. Thus, a 200-MHz C62xx has performance comparable to a conventional DSP running at 400 MIPS to 1,000 MIPS.
    -- http://www.csdmag.com/main/feat9710.htm [csdmag.com]

  • Marketing != Reality (Score:4)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @05:19AM (#719019) Homepage Journal
    Basic sales problem: How to communicate to a customer that the Whizbang2000 is faster then then the competing MegaFooFoo2000?

    Answer: Use a number that does in some vague way represent a speed difference and sounds really sexy, MHz. The more MHz you got the faster you are baby!

    Sure your neighbor has a 700 MHz box but for only a couple grand you can buy this new 1.2 *GHz* box and wipe him off of the map! We sold you cars this way, why not computers? Reality - pshaw - who cares? Joe Sixpack knows thay want "MHz" and MHz we'll sell him.

    AMD tried convincing folks their 300 MHZ was just as fast as Intel's 400 MHz chips (or whatever the exact speeds were.) Didn't work, "Processor Class" went away & when AMD surged in speeds they never looked back. Apple tries to convince everyone that their 500 MHz PowerPC is comparable to a 700 MHz Intel PIII and while it may well be no one cares - columnist after columnist sneers at Apple for it's poky 500 MHz (or dual 500 MHz) chips.

    Big-iron folks know, mini-folks know, workstation folks know, but the general computer buyer doesn't know that there's a dozen or so variables that affect the speed of a consumer box & CPU speed is only one of them. Motherboard speed, RAM speed, cache size & speed, hard drive speed, so many basic issues affect the 'speed' of a computer but are ignored for the MHz rating.

    So know you want to communicate this information to Joe Sixpack who just wants to come into the store, drop a few grand to get a fast box tricked out with today's must-have technology and be back home in an hour? Or to Savvy Shopper who's bought a dozen geek mags in the past week, read over every one yet still has no clue of what any term means & will want the 19 year-old community college part-time clerk to try & explain it all?

    No slams here but it aint gonna happen. Folks know MHz, they understand MHz are faster, they want MHz (or now GHz.) Sure they might buy a 1.2 GHz machine with crappy slow RAM & a 5400 RPM hard drive but it's gonna be FAST 'cause it's *1.2* *GHz*!

    "It goes to *11*, man! Not just "10" like everyone else but to *11*!"

    The rest of us roll our eyes but hell, that's the way the world works. You're not going to find another intrinsic value that communicates the speed of a computer to the general public better then MHz and there's no chance of getting everyone to agree to an artificial one.

  • Basic sales problem: How to communicate to a customer that the Whizbang2000 is faster then then the competing MegaFooFoo2000?

    But the marketing department doesn't care if the Whizbang2000 is faster than the MegaFooFoo2000. Remember, technical merit has no bearing on marketing. The only thing that matters is that the consumer thinks one is better than the other.

    That's why automobiles (and Windows) are identified by model year. A 2001 model must be better than a 2000 model, even though in reality they are 99% identical.

  • Marketing (Score:3)

    by funkman ( 13736 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @03:16AM (#719021)
    If marketing can be convinced that they can make a better sell by not using clock speed and by touting another feature they will.

    But then Marketing has to have the ability to teach the buyer. Not the easiest task in the world for something so technical.

    Clock speed is deathly easy to understand. Faster clock speed means faster computer. (Of course the clock speed argument breaks down when you look at different processors/different buses/supporting architectures/etc)

    My main point is: clock speed is the easiest and most effective sell for marketing.

    We geeks know the difference.

  • I'm still waiting for some marketroid to start advertisements for a 8,000,000,000 mHz 8086...

    //rdj

  • Agreement is necessary (Score:4)

    by Matt_Bennett ( 79107 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @04:29AM (#719023) Homepage Journal
    Neither MIPS or MHz is a truly accurate measure of the speed of a system, the problem is that no-one can agree on a standard. There are other much more mathematically rigorous measures, but which one will you choose? Are you going to measure integer, floating point, or vector processing? Bus speed? Cache hit rate? Unfortunately, the processing requirements for different applications vary as much as the applications themselves. Serving up web pages is a much different task than doing a 2-D FFT on a 16Kx16K floating point array. And processors and systems can be configured differently to do each efficiently.

    Consistency is key- if website A compares processors with suite X of speed tests, you can only compare that test with other things done with suite X (and probably only with website A). MHz is a much easier and quicker way to compare. Just one number. Just not an accurate number.

  • It's coming. There is just no way to get "timing closure" (i.e. resolve all timing differences/issues) in modern CBL (clocked boolean logic) IC designs as fast as the clock is, at the features sizes out there and the number of gates they sport. Most asynchronous technologies solve a number of power and EMI/clock skew issues, but there is still in the ease of design and design reuse (most asynchronous technologies are more difficult than CBL).

    Enter Theseus Logic [theseus.com]'s Null Convention Logic (NCL). A dual-rail logic implementation that has all the benefits of traditional async, but also sports an inheritly delay insensitive nature and complete reuseable design at new feature sizes, temperatures and voltages. And unlike other asyncs, any CBL designer can be easily retrained to understand NCL. IMHO, NCL is the only viable solution right now that will solve the upcoming brick wall that will hit the CBL world by 2006.

    Now since I've talked about NCL in at least 5 other /. posts, I'll let you read more. I'm no NCL expert (just the sysadmin at Theseus that seconds as a support engineer), so hit the web site for the most detailed info.

    -- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

  • As everyone should know by now, MIPS stands for Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed. It's completely arbitrary because of the different interpretations of the term "Instruction" between different CPU architectures. A better way would be to use real performance mesaurements, but I can't see Intel's marketing department going for that one: "buy our new Pentium IV (specint 57, specfp 94)". They're alway going to prefer "buy our new Pentium IV/1333 -- it's 33% faster than the Pentium IV/1000."
  • When you can't convince your friends that the millenium starts on Jan 1, 2001, what makes you think that you can convince them that the 500MHz processor A performs better for their particular use than the 1GHz processor B? Numbers count to people. In the same way that people celebrated the odometer of time switching all of its digits and calling it the new millenium, they will assume that, since 1000 is bigger than 500, then B is better than A. This is why computer stores often don't have the speed of an apple openly displayed next to the IBM PC compatibles.

    Were wishes fishes in the sea, we'd all be wishy-washy.
  • It's funny to see Hennessy and Patterson talk like that after they pushed that silly benchmark so hard in the first place. Can you imagine Donald Knuth pulling a 180 like that?

  • Compilers optimazers used to be rated (mayb still are, but now a says gcc is all I look at) by running bemchmarks. However it turned out that some venders wrote code to optimize best for the situations of the benchmarks, even though it ment a 1 in a million case was the best optimized while more useful optimizations are ignored (due to lack to time to impliment)

    I seem to recall a video card maker that detected benchmarks being run on the card, and didn't do anything other then report it was did what was asked.

  • I agree (Score:3)

    by HJ_Simpson ( 235588 ) on Tuesday October 10, 2000 @09:34AM (#719029) Homepage
    I think we should use the following scale:

    1. slow
    2. not quite as slow
    3. pretty fast
    4. fast
    5. very fast
    6. extremely fast
    7. hauls ass
    8. ridiculously fast
    9. danger, warps space-time
    10. jesus, this thing is friggin fast
    11. Pentium
  • Indeed. :) Required reading for anyone interested in the topic, if you ask me.
  • For Joe sixpack, I would have to say that there is virtually no difference between CPUs. And asside from frame-rate pissing contests with gamers, nobody cares about +/-3fps when playing UT at 1024x768x24b, and you're already surpassing the refresh rate of the human eye.

    I was talking to the owner of the local computer store the other day, and he can't sell anything under 5-600MHz in quantities that make them worth stocking, even to ppl who just want to surf the net, and do a bit of word-processing...

    Will Joe Sixpack ever notice the difference between his neighbor's 800MHz and his 1.1G?

    Doubtful.

    Should they stop making them faster?

    Anyone who's ever waited 24-hr to find out they misplaced a decimal point doing some number crunching (I hope I'm not the only one) will gladly say:

    Bring it on! - I don't care if they sell them by MHz, MIPS, or by the Oz, just as long as it's faster...

  • My main point is: clock speed is the easiest and most effective sell for marketing.

    I agree 100%. As much as they may irk and irritate us, the marketing department isn't stupid. They know enough about the technology to sell it, but more importantly, they know enough about the lowest common denominator, the consumer, to know what they're simply not smart enough to grasp.

    Don't believe me? Click here. [techtales.com] I rest my case.

  • MHZ does accurately describe the speed of most PCs because most all national vendors tend to sell the same general class of peripherals with any given processor. For example, Gateway, Dell, Compaq, et. al., all offer hard drives of about the same speed for any box based on a given processor. For example, notice that most mid-range P3s come with 7200 RPM IDE drives. In fact, they don't even market the brand of the drive in a given machine; this week it could be Quantum, next week Seagate. And while processor is only about 30% of the total performance equation, the other 70% comes from components that don't vary as much in performance. For example, all of these mid-range p3 boxes have the same speed ram, similarly-performing video cards, and hard drives that are fairly similar in terms of performance. So: the only remaining variable is the Proc, which does vary somewhat in performance. Thus: for most consumers, MHZ is a reasonable performance gauge for a new box (assuming its purchased from a national vendor). My $.02
  • It's really the same thing as cars... Horsepower isn't a "real" force, it's tourqe * rpm / 5250 (or something close to that).

    Anyways, the point is that people buy cars based on horsepower because that's what marketing has taught us to do. Torque wins races, HP sells cars.

    Just ask Mr. BigBlockMopar... doesn't matter if he's got a 426 or a 440, it'll still whoop a little honda with a big exhaust.

  • Why not list MHz, MIPS, BogoMIPS, and FLOPS? Wouldn't that give a much more detailed description if a CPU could top every one of its competitors in all categories? (is that even possible?)
    --
    Peace,
    Lord Omlette
    ICQ# 77863057
  • The absolute best example of how to handle model years is how Daimler-Benz did it back in the sixties. They only made incremental changes to the cars, usually unannounced, and did it over the course of production. A 1968 model-year 280 SEL/8 made in July was exactly the same car as the 1969 model-year made in Febuary. Perhaps in March they'd introduce four-wheel Kelsey-Hayes disc brakes, or a better five-speed manual, and that's what their Marketing people would hype. They might make a small stylistic change, like different chrome on the front directional signals, but you'd never actually hear the dealer hyping it..

    Didn't hurt that Mercedes was the unquestionable top of the heap tho..
  • I heard a talk in Stanford's EE380 class some years back by someone who benchmarked optimizers. He'd produce graphs for speed on various tests, normalized to the values for all the compilers. He'd benchmark against standard benchmarks and slightly modified versions of standard benchmarks. This brought out optimizers that recognized standard benchmark loops and cranked out hand-optimized code for them. Some actually did. He even found some that recognized them wrong; they'd recognize the modified benchmark as the standard one and emit the canned code, even though it was wrong for the source code being compiled.

    No cite, although I could probably find one if anyone cares enough.

  • > continued setup and managed to avoid the peice of paper issue.....
    > but i still to this day cant figure how you could think a peice
    > of paper interacts with windows in that way......

    Perhaps they just forgot to load the drivers for their barcode reader? (evil grin)
  • I know this is offtopic, but at work I have a G4 system, and it is a piece of junk. First of all, the computer is extremely sluggish compared to a $300 box I have win2k on (And am currently typing this with). Second, I have never had any problems installing a program like Office on any of my computers, whether Mac or Windows. Both are very easy to use. But, Windows has a much less cumbersone GUI, and it is much faster, and the computers it comes on are cheaper, and crash a lot less. Did I forget to mention that my G4 crashes a ton? More then Windows Mellenium does for sure. As far as Mac users go, anything Apple tells them they believe. So they actually do believe that their 500Mhz G4's are much faster then my Celeron 400, when in fact my Celeron 400 is much snappier. Even if you a die-hard Mac user use a PC for a week, they will complain that Windows is slow, ugly, and crashed more then Mac OS 9. So why do people buy them? Yes! Because both a) People buy Macs because they are "cute" b) People buy Macs because they are the "fastest" c) People buy Macs because they are "easy to use" While I think Macs look toylike, others may like the way they look. While I think Macs (I use a G4 400 with 128MB ram on a regular basis) are very sluggish to respond compared to Windows machines, other people will claim the world that a Mac is *much faster* then any Windows based computer that you can get. Lastly, Macs streamline a lot of things so they are easier for the non computer user to understand. This is the one valid reason to purchase a Mac, in my opinion. Why do I use a Mac at work? Because most of the computers there are Macs and I need compatability with them.
  • MHZ is still hyped simply because it still matters. A 1.5 GHZ CPU is kick-ass, much faster system than a puny 600 MHZ. As much as MHZ is a misleading speed measure it's an accurate one MOST OF THE TIME.

    When we reach some GHZ limit and moores law breaks (if ever) then maybe architecture and other factors will take over in deciding system speed but today the MHZ is the primary factor in differentiating a system five years ago and a system today.

    Read more... [slashdot.org]

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