Introduction to Computer Systems - Fundamentals of Computer Organization and Architecture - page 6

which in turn has led to a number of developments. Among these is the increase in
the number of devices in RAM memories, which in turn helps designers to trade off
memory size for speed. The improvement in the feature size provides golden oppor-
tunities for introducing improved design styles.

1.4. PERFORMANCE MEASURES

In this section, we consider the important issue of assessing the performance of a
computer. In particular, we focus our discussion on a number of performance
measures that are used to assess computers. Let us admit at the outset that there
are various facets to the performance of a computer. For example, a user of a
computer measures its performance based on the time taken to execute a given
job (program). On the other hand, a laboratory engineer measures the performance
of his system by the total amount of work done in a given time. While the user
considers the program execution time a measure for performance, the laboratory
engineer considers the throughput a more important measure for performance. A
metric for assessing the performance of a computer helps comparing alternative
designs.
Performance analysis should help answering questions such as how fast can a
program be executed using a given computer? In order to answer such a question,
we need to determine the time taken by a computer to execute a given job. We
define the clock cycle time as the time between two consecutive rising (trailing)
edges of a periodic clock signal (Fig. 1.1). Clock cycles allow counting unit compu-
tations, because the storage of computation results is synchronized with rising (trail-
ing) clock edges. The time required to execute a job by a computer is often expressed
in terms of clock cycles.
We denote the number of CPU clock cycles for executing a job to be the cycle
count (CC), the cycle time by CT, and the clock frequency by f ¼

1

/ CT.The

time taken by the CPU to execute a job can be expressed as

CPU time ¼ CC CT ¼ CC = f

It may be easier to count the number of instructions executed in a given program as
compared to counting the number of CPU clock cycles needed for executing that

Figure 1.1 Clock signal