The considerations that went into choosing the machines to be
benchmarked were availability, variety and portability of the CAD
tools we are using. We selected five architectures whose
specifications are given in Table 2
. All except Intel 80586 are
RISC architectures. We decided to make Sparc 10 our base machine. A
very practical concern was portability of the tools we were
benchmarking across the different architectures.
Table 2: Machine specifications
Note that the benchmarking experiments were performed almost a year
ago and machines used do not represent the state-of-the-art
architectures of current days. However, our benchmarking methodology
remains applicable to any set of architectures.
