Trends in Cost

 Why is understanding cost factors important for an

architect?
 To make intelligent design decisions
 Cost/performance is important
 Costs have historically reduced over time
 Learning curve
 Increasing volume
 Competition
 Yield is a metric of where the learning curve is and
how it progresses
 Yield is % of manufactured chips that actually work
 Benchmark Challenges

 Companies thrive or bust depending on

price/performance
- Hence they optimize for benchmarks

- Popular synthetic benchmarks – Whetstone, Dhrystone

- Problem is you never run the benchmark in real

applications
 Benchmark Suites

 Use a collection of benchmarks – SPEC 92, SPEC 95

 Must report for reproducibility

- List everything another experimenter would use to

reproduce the results
 Quantitative Principles

 Make the Common Case Fast

- Most pervasive design principle
 Amdahl’s Law Definitions
- Speed up gained from a particular enforcement
Execution time for entire task withou u sin the enhancement
Speedup 
Execution time for entire task u sin g the enhancement when possible

- Depends on two factors

1) The fraction of the computation time in the original machine

that can be converted to take advantage of the enhancement-
Fractionenhanced < 1

2) The improvement gained by the enhanced execution mode, –

Speedup enhanced > 1
 Amdahl’s Law (Cont’d)

 Fractionenhanced 
Execution timenew  Execution timeold x  1  Fractionenhanced   
 Speedupenhanced 

Execution timeold 1
Speed overall  
Execution timenew  Fractionenhanced 
 1  Fractionenhanced   
 Speedupenhanced 
 CPU Performance Equation
CPU clock cycles for a program
CPU time 
Clock rate

If IC = instruction count
and CPI = clock cycles per instruction (CPI);

CPU clock cycles for a program

CPI 
IC

Hence
IC x CPI
CPU time 
Clock rate

or

CPU time  IC x CPI x Clock cycle time

 CPU Performance Equation (Cont’d)

 Depends on 3 factors
- Clock rate or cycle time, CPI, IC

 Unfortunately, they are inter-dependent

- Cycle time depends on HW technology and organization
- CPI depends on organization and ISA
- IC depends on ISA and compiler technology
 CPU Performance Equation (Cont’d)

 Often CPI’s are easier to deal with on a per

instruction basis
 n 
CPU time    CPI i x ICi  x Clock cycle time
i  1 

ICi  number of time instruction i is executed

 Overall CPI
 n 
  CPI i x ICi 
i  1  n
 ICi 
CPI    
 CPI i x  
Instruction count i 1  Instruction count 
 Fallacies And Pitfalls

 MIPS is an accurate measure for comparing

performance among computers
 MFLOPS is a consistent and useful measure of
performance
 Synthetic benchmarks predict performance for
real programs
 Benchmarks remain valid indefinitely
 Peak performance track observed performance
 Trends in Cost

 Why is understanding cost factors important for an

architect?
 To make intelligent design decisions
 Cost/performance is important
 Costs have historically reduced over time
 Learning curve
 Increasing volume
 Competition
 Yield is a metric of where the learning curve is and
how it progresses
 Yield is % of manufactured chips that actually work
 Die Sizes
Intel
 Pentium
 .8u Pentium 60 = 288 mm2
 .6u Pentium 90 = 156 mm2
 .35u MMX = 128 mm2
 Pentium Pro
 .6u = 306 mm2
 .35u = 195 mm2
 DEC
 .5u 21164 = 298 mm2
 Motorola
 .5u PPC 604 = 196 mm2
 1
Performance 
Execution Time
X is n times faster than Y means
Execution Time Y
n
Execution Time X
Im proving Performance  Decrea sin g Execution Time