“Evolution and Performance” in

[ Microprocessor and
Assembly Language ]

Lecture-05

M. M. Yasin
myasin@cuisahiwal.edu.pk
 [ Topics Covered ]
• Performance Assessment Techniques
1. Clock Speed/Rate

2. CPI

3. MIPS Rate

4. SPEC Benchmark

5. Amdahl’s Law

Note: Topics covered are from chapter 3 of William Stallings book.

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 [ Performance Assessment ]

Key Parameters in Evaluation Criteria

Size
Cost
Security
Reliability
Performance
Energy Saving and Power Consumption

Note: Evaluation Criteria may vary among systems that are designed for
different applications.

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 1. Clock Speed/Rate

“Rate of pulses”
e.g., 1GHz processor, how many pulses per second???

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 Clock Speed & Instructions per Second
Execution of an
instruction involves: Fetching,
Decoding,
Loading and Storing data
Performing arithmetic and logical
operations

Deduction: Simple clock speed is not an accurate/true measure of

different Processors’ Performance, hence requiring
complex assessment mechanism. (Why???)

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 2. Instruction Execution Rate

Avg. Cycle Per Instruction:

CPIi : Number of cycles required for instruction type i

Ii : Number of executed instructions of type i for a given program
Ic : Instruction count for a program as the number of machine
instructions executed for that program

Processor Time to execute a given program:

𝜏 is constant cycle time and 𝜏 = 1/f, where f is the processor clock frequency.

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 Since Instruction Execution involves Processor Cycle Time
as well as Memory Cycle Time
and these aren't equal,
therefore need to refine the above relation.

p: Number of processor cycles needed to decode/execute an instruction

m: Number of memory references needed
k: Ratio b/w memory and processor cycle time

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Above five performance factors are influenced/affected by
below four system attributes:
1. Instruction Set Design
2. How effective the Compiler is in producing an efficient
machine language program
3. Processor Implementation
4. Cache and Memory Hierarchy

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 3. Processor Performance Measures

Millions of Instructions Per Second:

Millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second:

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 3. Processor Performance Measures
MIPs and MFLOPs are not true measures to evaluate system
performance.
Consider, A=B+C ;Assume all are in main memory
with CISC, add mem(B), mem(C), mem(A)

while on a typical RISC Machine,

load mem(B), reg(1);
load mem(C), reg(2);
add reg(1), reg(2), reg(3);
store reg(3), mem(A);

Execution times equal, but CISC = 1 MIPS and RISC = 4 MIPS

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 4. Benchmarking
• Using a set of Benchmark Programs, called Benchmark Suite

• SPEC Benchmark (System Performance Evaluation Corporation)

I. SPEC CPU2006: For Processor-intensive applications rather than I/O

II. SPECjvm98: For Combined HW and SW aspects of the Java Virtual

Machine (JVM) client platform

III. SPECjbb2000 (Java Business Benchmark): for Evaluating server-side

Java-based electronic commerce applications

IV. SPECweb99: For WWW Servers

V. SPECmail2001: For systems acting as Mail Server

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 4. Benchmarking

• Averaging a number of Benchmark Programs

To obtain a reliable comparison of the performance of various

computers, a number of benchmark programs are run on each

machine, then average the results.

These results could be averaged by,

Arithmetic Mean, Harmonic Mean or Geometric Mean.

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 5. Amdahl’s Law

Consider a program running on a single processor such that

( 1-f ): fraction of the execution time involves code that is inherently

serial.

f: fraction involves code that is infinitely parallelizable.

T: Total execution time of the program using a single processor.

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 5. Amdahl’s Law

Then the Speedup using a parallel processor with N processors that

fully exploits the parallel portion of the program is as follow:

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 5. Amdahl’s Law
Amdahl’s law generalization to evaluate any Design and Technology

Improvement in a computer system:

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 5. Amdahl’s Law
Suppose that a feature of the system is used (during execution) a

fraction of the time f, before enhancement, and that the speedup of

that feature after enhancement is SUf .

Then the overall Speedup of the system is:

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