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