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

From Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>
Newsgroups comp.compilers
Subject These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations versus other, non-arithmetic computations?
Date 2021-07-14 18:30 +0000
Organization Compilers Central
Message-ID <21-07-004@comp.compilers> (permalink)

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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]

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These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations versus other, non-arithmetic computations? Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2021-07-14 18:30 +0000
  Re: These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations versus other, non-arithmetic computations? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2021-07-15 02:31 -0700
    Re: These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations versus other, non-arithmetic computations? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2021-07-15 22:02 +0200
    Re: These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations versus other, non-arithmetic computations? "Robin Vowels" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2021-07-16 14:47 +1000
    Re: fast arithmetic hardware, was These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2021-07-15 23:49 -0700
      Re: fast arithmetic hardware, was These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2021-07-16 16:22 -0400
  Re: These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations versus other, non-arithmetic computations? "Robin Vowels" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2021-07-16 15:12 +1000
    Re: ancient floating point, These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations Philipp Klaus Krause <pkk@spth.de> - 2021-07-16 18:31 +0200
      Re: ancient floating point, These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2021-07-17 23:14 +0200
  Re: These days what percentage of a CPU's work involves doing arithmetic computations versus other, non-arithmetic computations? Derek Jones <derek@NOSPAM-knosof.co.uk> - 2021-07-19 15:35 +0100
  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> - 2021-07-27 14:07 -0700

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