I am trying to get a feel for how different hardware options perform running Squeak and how that translates in practice into the user's experience.
We currently use mainly the bytecodes/second and sends/second numbers for this which aren't available for older machines. I was particularly interested in the Dorado since that was considered the minimum performance for "acceptable" Smalltalking and other machines were evaluated in terms of how many Dorados they got (normally a small percentage in the early days).
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 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.
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. 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.
If anyone has actual numbers, I would like to see them.
The Dorado was really, really impressive. If re-implemented on a modern FPGA (not the low cost ones) it would be at most about six times faster than the original. That would be too slow for Squeak. As a custom chip in a slightly older process (0.18um for example) it would be around ten times faster than that, which would be just "usable". This doesn't make sense to me. The fastest machines are getting about 200M bps out of the interpreter and Bryce's compiler improves that to nearly 700M bps. I think I have lost an order of magnitude somewhere along the way.
-- Jecel
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