ECEg-3143

Computer Architecture
&
Organization

Lecture 2- Computer Performance

Concepts
Today’s Lecture

Performance Concepts
• Response Time
• Throughput

Performance Evaluation
• Benchmarks

Amdahl’s Law
• Speedup what is important
 Performance Perspectives
1. Purchaser perspective
• Given a collection of machines, which has the
- Best performance ?
- Least cost ?
- Best performance / cost ?

2. Designer perspective
• Faced with design options, which has the
- Best performance improvement ?
- Least cost ?
- Best performance / cost ?

Both require
• basis for comparison
• metric for evaluation
Our goal: understand cost & performance implications of architectural
choices
 1. Purchaser perspective

Desktop computing
Metrics: latency, execution time for a single task, cost

Server computing
Examples: web servers, transaction servers, file servers
Metrics: throughput , reliability

- how many jobs can the machine run at once?

- what is the average execution rate?

Embedded computing
Examples: printer, cell phone, video console
Metrics: performance (real-time), cost, power consumption

4
Purchaser perspective – Example
Throughput
Plane DC to Paris Speed Passengers (pmph)

Boeing 747 6.5 hours 610 mph 470 286,700

Concorde 3 hours 1350 mph 132 178,200

Which has higher performance?

• Response time and throughput often are in opposition
Example

• Time of Concorde vs. Boeing 747?

• Concord is 1350 mph / 610 mph = 2.2 times faster

= 6.5 hours / 3 hours

• Throughput of Concorde vs. Boeing 747 ?

• Concord is 178,200 pmph / 286,700 pmph = 0.62 “times faster”

• Boeing is 286,700 pmph / 178,200 pmph = 1.60 “times faster”

• Boeing is 1.6 times (“60%”) faster in terms of throughput

• Concord is 2.2 times (“120%”) faster in terms of flying time

If we upgrade a machine with a new processor what do we increase?

If we add a new machine to the lab what do we increase?
Benchmarks (Evaluation Tools)
How we evaluate differences
• Different systems
• Changes to a single system

Provide a target
• Benchmarks should represent large class of important programs

Popular Benchmark Suites

Desktop
• SPEC CPU2000 - CPU intensive, integer & floating-point applications
• SPECviewperf, SPECapc - Graphics benchmarks

Embedded
• EEMBC - Collection of kernels from 6 application areas

Servers
• TPC-C - Transaction processing system
2. How a computer designer increase
performance?

Amdhal’s Low - Make the Common Case Fast

8
Amdahl's “Law”: Speed Up calculation
Example 1
 Example (2):- Design comparison
Suppose FP square root (FPSQR) is responsible for 20% of the
execution time of a critical graphics benchmark.

• One proposal is to enhance the FPSQR hardware and

speed up this operation by a factor of 10.

• The other alternative is just to try to make all FP

instructions in the graphics processor run faster by a
factor of 1.6; FP instructions are responsible for a total of
50% of the execution time for the application.

– Compare these two alternatives.

11
We can compare these two alternatives by
comparing the speedups.

• Improving the performance of the FP operations

overall is slightly better because of the higher
frequency.
12
Example (3)
You have a system that contains a special processor for
doing floating-point operations. You have determined that
50% of your computations can use the floating-point
processor. The speedup of the floating pointing-point
processor is 15.

a) Overall speedup achieved by using the floating-point

processor.

13
b) Overall speedup achieved if you modify the
compiler so that 75% of the computations can use the
floating-point processor.

c) What fraction of the computations should be able

to use the floating–point processor in order to
achieve an overall speedup of 2.25?

14
15