[squeak-dev] Alto And Dorado performance

Yoshiki Ohshima yoshiki at vpri.org
Fri Apr 3 07:59:07 UTC 2009


  Hello,

  For some reason, this page:
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/000850.html
and emails around:
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2005-April/091215.html

got my attention.  Jecel and Tim speculated in one email that Dorado
run 200k-400k bytecode/sec, and later something like 1.75m bc/s. I
would imagine that some 20Mhz microcoded pipelining processor with
supporting I/O processors would surely do better than 1 bytecode per
100 clock cycles.  10 cycles for 1 bytecode sounds still too much (as
it is like current Squeak implementation, which seems to be more
efficient than Apple Smalltalk) but it might have been like that.
Also, table 9.1 and 9.2 in the Green Book (around p. 169 of
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BitsOfHistory/BitsOfHistory.pdf)
seem to indicate that Dorado ran about 20-30 times faster than the
assmebly implementation on MC68000 running at 5Mhz.  So Dorado was
probably 5-6 times more efficient if normalized to the same clock
speed, and here it could be said that 4 cycles for 1 bytecode or such?
So with a very rough assesment, a CISC at 100Mhz would be comparable
to Dorado, and a 4GHz processor would be like 40 times faster than
Dorado, yet the transistor-count-wise, we indeed lost hundreds?

  I tried http://www.squeaksource.com/SystemBenchmarks.html on my
computer and compare the numbers with the tables in the Green Book,
but it appears that the repetition counts must be very different.
Does anybody know the old numbers used in the book?

-- Yoshiki



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