How do dhrystone/whetstone or other benchmarks measure performance?
Dhrystone – Wikipedia: Dhrystone is a synthetic benchmark program developed in 1984 by Reinhold P. Weicker intended to be representative of system (integer) programming. The Dhrystone grew to become representative of general processor (CPU) performance until it was superseeded (sic) by the CPU89 benchmark suite from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, today known as the “SPECint” suite. The Dhrystone benchmark contains no floating point operations, thus the name is a pun on the then-popular Whetstone benchmark for floating point operations. The output from the benchmark is the number of Dhrystones per second (the number of iterations of the main code loop per second).
