4 ms·
Benchmarks like these still have their place, in part because many contemporary benchmarks are too specific. A non-trivial number of Phoronix benchmarks, for in
by johnklos 4y ago
Benchmarks like these still have their place, in part because many contemporary benchmarks are too specific. A non-trivial number of Phoronix benchmarks, for instance, can't be run on ten or twenty year old OSes, so they're not the best for comparing advances in OS efficiency, as an example.
What'd be nice is a collection of ByteBench results for machines and OSes going back to the '80s. It's interesting to see what has progressed by leaps and bounds versus what has progressed more gradually. For instance, a few comparisons from the early '80s to now:
Memory size: 64K 64GB factor of 1,000,000
Memory bandwidth: 1MB/sec 50GB/sec factor of 50,000
Instructions/sec: 1 million 10 billion/core 10,000 per core
Disk size: 5M 10TB factor of 2,000,000
Magnetic disk speed: 150K/sec 250MB/sec factor of just 1,666
Very general, but we can see that the amounts of increase varies wildly.
- easygenes 4y agoA nit: If we're saying memory size is 64GB, that's in HEDT and workstation territory, so let's look at memory bandwidth of, e.g., M1 Max or Ultra at 400-800GB/s (so factor of 400,000-800,000). "Whereas M1 Max had 16 LPDDR5-6400 channels for a total of 408GB/second of memory bandwidth, M1 Ultra doubles that to 32 LPDDR5 channels and 800GB/second of memory bandwidth." [1] Realistically, there were plenty of higher end systems in the early 80s with more than 64K of RAM as well, so maybe more fair to compare to the specs of, an Apple IIe to a M1 Ultra Mac Studio as a sort of common denominator (similarly priced, given inflation). Problem then is that systems in the early 80s didn't include a hard drive, so you're looking at a $3,500 add-on (in 2022 dollars) just to get to parity in terms of computer features we now consider basic requirements. With that extra $3,500 we're in territory looking something more like this: Memory size: 64K 128GB factor of 2,000,000 Memory bandwidth: 1MB/sec 800GB/sec factor of 800,000 Instructions/sec: 500,000 10 billion/core 20,000 per core Disk size: 5M 8TB factor of 1,600,000 Magnetic disk speed: 150K/sec 500MB/sec factor of just 3,300 [2] Actual drives compared: 150K/sec 7.5GB/sec factor of 50,000 1: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17306/apple-announces-m1-ultra-combining-two-m1-maxes-for-even-more-performance 2: https://www.storagereview.com/news/seagate-exos-2x14-hdd-delivers-524mb-s
- Vecr 4y agoThe actual drive speed should be 7.5GB/sec, not TB/sec, right? The TB number is faster than the memory bandwidth you put in the table.
- easygenes 4y agoWhoops. Thanks, fixed.
- johnklos 4y agoI like your example - Apple II to Apple ARM makes for a very interesting path :) Personally, I'm running NetBSD on m68030 Mac systems (and Amiga), so comparing them with Apple ARM gives some interesting direct comparisons. I'll have to write them up some day. https://twitter.com/AnachronistJohn/status/1501257278321827848 https://twitter.com/AnachronistJohn/status/15012572783218278...