Re: These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations versus other, non-arithmetic computations?

"minf...@arcor.de" <minforth@arcor.de>
Tue, 27 Jul 2021 14:07:35 -0700 (PDT)

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From: "minf...@arcor.de" <minforth@arcor.de>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2021 14:07:35 -0700 (PDT)
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 21-07-004
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Keywords: history, architecture, comment
Posted-Date: 27 Jul 2021 17:54:35 EDT
In-Reply-To: 21-07-004

Roger L Costello schrieb am Mittwoch, 14. Juli 2021 um 21:42:37 UTC+2:
> Hello Compiler Experts!
>
> As I understand it, computers were originally designed to do arithmetic
> computations and in the old days nearly 100% of a CPU's work involved
> arithmetic computations.
>
> I look at what I now do on a daily basis with computers and it is primarily
> text processing. My guess is that "text processing" at the machine level
> mostly means doing comparisons and moving things into and out of
> memory/registers; that is, not much in the way of arithmetic computations. Is
> that correct?
>
> These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic
> computations versus other, non-arithmetic computations?
>
> /Roger
> [I don't think it was ever true except perhaps on the ENIAC. Also, what do
> you mean by arithmetic? Are the additions and multiplications to do indexing
> and array addresssing arithmetic? If you mean floating point. there wasn't
> any floating point hardware until the IBM 704 in 1954 but there was plenty
> of computing before that. -John]


Cryptocurrency mining does not involve lots of text processing. ;-)
Computational weather forecasting neither, or medical image processing .. etc etc ..
Define your application domain and you get a different response


From historic perspective, a big driver for developing "computation machines"
had been military applications. Specifically artillery computers.
[Unless someone can return this thread to compilers, I think it would better fit
in comp.arch and alt.folklore.computers, both of which regularly discuss old
computer designs. -John]


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