[Nottingham] CPU and Memory benchmark programs

[Robert Davies]

On Monday 31 March 2003 18:49, Martin wrote:
> Interesting... But what are the multiple indexes listed below?
>
> Also, memtest86 gives an estimate of memory bandwidth for your hardware
> to compare against any software benchmark figures.

The index's are compared to a Pentium 90, the CPU I showed results for was a 
Celeron 300A running at FSB of 100Mhz for 50% overclock, so a 9.5x Integer 
speed up is quite impressive.

Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38

Not that that really means very much, the compiler changed, the underlying 
OS, the C library as well as the CPUs.  I was more interested to compare the 
9.5, 7, 2.25, 2.5 & 3.93 (gcc-3.2, -i686) against the 8.2, 6.77, 1.9, 2.1 and 
3.72  (gcc-2.95r3 -i686) and 7.7, 7.0, 2.26, 1.70 and 3.89 (gcc-3.2, i386).  
Even here don't take those numbers as exact, it was just very noticeable that 
-march=i686 *does* give a real boost, and gcc-3.2 generates better code than 
gcc-2.95.

Combined with newer techniques like prelinking for ld.so with glibc-2.3, 
gcc-3 is going to provide a noticeable speed up on compression, encryption 
and starting desktop environments.  This repeats again the achievement of the 
glibc-2.1 based releases with gcc-2.95r2&3 which were significantly faster 
than the previous generation.

Rob