Simple example: The PS3 PPE and Xbox 360 CPU are RISC processors that run at 3.2GHz, but their non-vector performance is rather poor. You’d be lucky to get about 33% effective utilization out of them (up to 50%, tops, but that’s really pushing it), so if you were to map this onto another architecture, you’d have at least a 3x conversion from this end alone (the other end could also have a scaling factor).
Ultimately, how these values are expressed isn’t the important part. It’s the ability to measure the impact of a change that’s important. If some metric changes by, say, 5%, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s expressed in MIPS, INTOPS, MB or GB. The fact that it changed is what matters and what the effect is on the baseline (that ultimately could be expressed as a certain specific hardware configuration). It would probably be practical to have a number of comparable concrete min spec configurations and even more ideal would be if people in the community would have these systems up and running to do actual on-target performance benchmarks.
jp
Might I suggest that the min-spec, if developed, target the RISC-V Rocket architecture (running on FPGA, I suppose) as a reference point for performance? This may be much lower performance than desirable, however, it means that we don't lock people into using large-vendor chipsets which have unknown, or known to be bad, security properties such as Intel AMT.
In general, targeting open hardware seems to me to be more critical than performance metrics for the long term health of Bitcoin, however, performance is still important.
Does anyone know how the RISC-V FPGA performance stacks up to, say, a Raspberry Pi?
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