Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel@merlintec.com wrote:
By running the benchmarks for the "green book" and doing a lot of rough extrapolations, my guess is that the Dorado would get between 200K and 400K bytecodes/sec.
That is pretty much what I remember as the claim for Dorados.
That is better than what I got running Squeak 1.16 on a 33MHz 486 machine which was some 13 years newer, but far below what I expected. My impression was that the old 20MHz ECL computer was able to reach a peak of one bytecode per clock which would indicate a number around three or four times better.
I was under the impression that the Dorado was a 70nS cycle machine, ie 14MHz or so. And many bytecodes would take more than one cycle of course.
After looking at a bunch of numbers my conclusion is that Squeak is usable on machines capable of at least 20M bps. If my guess above is corrent, that would be around 60 Dorados.
My Iyonix does about 35mbc/s on the dumb-bytecodes test and about 20 Dorado in the greenbook tests - with a tiny cache (don't imagine Dorado had much of one either!) the longer prims etc suffer relative to a monster watt-sucker like a pentium.
My first ARM system was 4 mips (no cache at all, not even instruction pre- fetch) with 4Mb of slow ram. It scored 27% Dorado but was thoroughly usable as a UI. It could scan and layout nice formatted text in pretty fonts faster than the contemporaneous PCs running Aldus (for example) could do. The ARM 3 upgrade gave 10mips and 127% on the same motherboard/ram. The Iyonix is 600MHz with larger caches and fast memory but only scores 15 times faster, an indication of how much there is still to get out of a simple interpreter.
If both estimates are true, then I wonder if our definition of "acceptable" has changed or if Squeak has become less efficient. Certainly Morphic is always being blamed for slowing everything down, so the latter is probably the case.
I suspect it is largely the rather poor UI responsiveness that is the problem. In MVC on my machine the UI flies, menus are instant, browser bang open etc. In morphic every thing is
really
slowwwwwwwwww
Some of it is simply that morphic is sloshing large bitmaps around with high colour depths. Some of it is probably some dumb algorthmic error that nobody has spotted yet.
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim Useful random insult:- Useful as a hip pocket on a T-shirt.