On relating small computer performance to design parameters

This paper presents a method for correlating performance measures of small computers to design parameters. An experiment is described in which execution times and memory space requirements are gathered for three small benchmark kernels when run on fifteen small computers. The benchmarks are drawn from three different application areas. All of them exercise only the CPU ↔ memory area of the machines, and I/0 operations are not involved.Using standard regression analysis techniques, this data is then used to calculate coefficients in empirical equations which relate the performance measures, time and space, to easily quantifiable design parameters of the machines.