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The reason they're dancing around the performance figures is because a) synthetic benchmarks like SPEC and CoreMark are of questionable value, and b) They don't
by microcolonel 11y ago
The reason they're dancing around the performance figures is because a) synthetic benchmarks like SPEC and CoreMark are of questionable value, and b) They don't have chips in customers' hands quite yet, so they can't be independently reproduced.
If you look at the current results for Rocket and BOOM, you'll find that these microarchitectures seem competitive with Cortex A5/A8 and Cortex A15 respectively at comparable frequencies.
In addition to this, they seem to have some significant amount of space savings on die. Power/performance ratios already seem to be better (likely due in part to smaller die area).
On a power-performance front, a bigger OoO RISC-V could likely be competitive in peak performance to an intel, though you'd have to find a market for that. There has also been a lot of discussion about a real vector machine extension, and that would likely wipe the floor with x86's packed SIMD if done right.
- wsxcde 11y agoMuch more importantly, an Intel design team has something like 1200 engineers working for 2-2.5 years on the next generation of an existing processor. I don't know about ARM, but I'd guess they probably something like a team of 200-300 people on working on each revision.There's no way a team of 10 or so grad students can hope to out-optimize them. Also SPEC isn't a synthetic benchmark, it contains real applications like bzip2 and gcc.
- _chris_ 11y agoThe problem with SPEC is it is a 1990's workstation benchmark suite... should my cell phone processor's design be guided by how quickly it can compile ia32 code? Or simulate quantum computers?
- wsxcde 11y agoSure, that's fair. I was just pedantic about the precise meaning of a "synthetic" benchmarks, which is a benchmark generated to mimic real code but isn't a real/useful application by itself.