[comp.sys.hp] A question about flat out Snake speed.

ssr@stokes.Princeton.EDU (Steve S. Roy) (04/03/91)

With all the discussion of the speed of HP's hot new Snake systems,
I've been wondering what their peak speeds are.  Suppose you hand
coded a matrix multiply, trig function, FFT or whatever.  What is the
maximum speed you could get and what would the limiting factors be?
Is a daxpy ( x = a*x+y ) limited by the FPU or by cache or by main
memory?  How flexible is the multiply accumulate?  Can the integer and
fp units run in parallel as on the i860?

Yes, I know that this sort of theoretical peak speed is often
irrelevent for whole applications.  I still want to know because in my
codes I know which parts I can apply this treatment to and I can then
calculate the speedup I would see.  I'm also curious to find out how
good the compiler is at exploiting the architecture.

Thanks.
Steve Roy