Hierarchical INTegration, or HINT for short, is a computer

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that ranks a computer system as a whole (i.e. the entire computer instead of individual components). It measures the full range of performance, mostly based on the amount of work a computer can perform over time. A system with a very fast processor would likely be rated poorly if the buses were very poor compared to those of another system that had both an average processor and average buses. For example, in the past,

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computers with relatively slow processor speeds (800 MHz) used to perform better than

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

based systems with processors running at nearly 2 GHz. HINT is known for being almost immune to artificial optimization and can be used by many computers ranging from a calculator to a supercomputer. It was developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's

Ames Laboratory Ames National Laboratory, formerly Ames Laboratory, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Ames, Iowa, and affiliated with Iowa State University. It is a top-level national laboratory for research on national sec ...

and is licensed under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

. HINT is intended to be "scalable" to run on any size computer, from small serial systems to highly parallel supercomputers. The person using the HINT benchmark can use any floating-point or integer type. HINT benchmark results have been published comparing a variety of parallel and uniprocessor systems. A related tool ANALYTIC HINT can be used as a design tool to estimate the benefits of using more memory, a faster processor, or improved communications (bus speed) within the system.

References

External links

official site

article discussing HINT benchmark

benchmark sources download

benchmark sources download
{{compu-hardware-stub Benchmarks (computing)

See also

References

External links