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If you're counting all instruction executing in parallel with the maximum on-paper IPC on all CPUs, accelerators, and GPUs, the number your get has no clear relation to RAM latency. It really is comparing apples and oranges.

This scenario where all your 16 cores are doing 10 instructions per clock assumes everything is running without waiting, at full instruction-level and CPU-level parallelism. It's a measure of the maximum paper throughput when you're not blocked waiting on memory.

You could compare that to the maximum throughput of the RAM and the memory subsystem, and that would give you meaningful numbers (for instance, how many bytes/cycle can my cores handle? How many GB/s can my whole system process?).

Trying to add up the combined throughput of everything you can on one side and the latency of a single fetch on the other side will give you a really big number, but as a metaphor it will be more confusing than anything.



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