Linux Desktop CPU Roundup: Cutting Edge Penguin Performance

Synthetic Benchmarks

Synthetic benchmarks can still give us a good idea of what our processors should be doing. However, since they are theoretical and not good real world demonstrations of the technology, we generally rely on them only to prove or disprove if our testbeds are operating correctly. Below is the Scalar Product Opstone 04q2 as described by the author:

"The 'SP' benchmark calculates the scalar product (dot product) of 2 vectors ranging in size from 16 elements to 1048576 elements for both single and double-precision floats. Although the Gflops/sec. for every vector length is recorded (in the resulting output log file), the average of all these values is reported. This benchmark is indicative of the performance of many raw floating-point data processing apps (movie format conversion, MP3 extraction, etc.)"

We used the Athlon 64 binaries under SuSE x86_64, and the Pentium4 binaries under SuSE x86.

Hold your mouse over for the 64-bit graph.

Below is the SSP benchmark, as explained by the author:

"The 'ssp' benchmark also calculates the scalar product of 2 vectors, except that these vectors are sparsely populated (only the non-zero value elements are stored) ranging from a 'loading factor' (non-zero/zero elements) of 0.000001 to 0.01 for both single and double-precision floats. Since the data is not contiguous in memory, the performance is much lower than regular 'sp' and is measured in Mflops/sec. There is not much difference in performance between different loading factors as this benchmark really challenges the ability of the processor to perform short bursts of calculations coupled with lots of conditional testing. It is this reason that the P4 with its longer pipeline does not generally perform as well as the Athlon64. This benchmark is indicative of the performance of many 3D games as the processing is similar (short bursts of calculations with numerous conditional testing)"

Hold your mouse over for the 64-bit graph.

The Intel processors score very high marks on our Opstone benchmarks. Unfortunately, we find that this is not entirely indicative of good performance, and in fact, the Opstone benchmark does not scale well with the rest of our test suite.