Benchmarking Athlons

Here you will find the results of some attempts at benchmarking various Athlon-based systems. The benchmarks are not necessarily widespread or well-known, but they do replicate the sort of work that these machines are normally used for.

Benchmarks Used

utah-g3d "speed test" - computation of the gravity effect of 523305 blocks at 441 positions. This is a total of 230,777,505 block computations. Computations are purely floating point, and the entire model can fit into RAM on most modern machines; the benchmark does include disk I/O for reading the model and writing results. Also note that different compilation options can radically alter the times; turning off optimization for gcc on the Celeron SMP system doubles the time of the benchmark.

The computation code is most likely limited by the divide and sqrt operations; the remainder of the code is ~24 addition/multiplication ops. It is also possible that memory lookup is the limiting factor; without extensive benchmarking using instruction counters, it is difficult to determine what is the bottleneck.

utah-g3d is available here; it is released under the GPL.

Athlon 1.4GHz Thunderbird

OS: Linux 2.4.7 / Debian
RAM: 512MB Physical

Benchmarks:
  utah-g3d "speed test"        58.12s

Athlon 1.2GHz Palomino

OS: Linux 2.4.7 SMP / Debian
RAM: 512MB Physical

Benchmarks:
  utah-g3d "speed test"        49.51s
    1 of 2 CPUs used for benchmark
  utah-g3d compute code; 365625 blocks @
           14625 points (5.3469e9 block
           calculations)     1011.22s

Duron 700MHz

OS: Linux 2.4.0-test9 / Debian
RAM: 128MB Physical

Benchmarks:
  utah-g3d "speed test"        95.97s

Celeron 400MHz SMP

OS: Linux 2.4.0-test6 SMP - 1 CPU used
RAM: 384MB Physical

Benchmarks:
  utah-g3d "speed test"       227.97s

Pentium III 500MHz SMP

OS: Linux 2.2.16 SMP - 1 CPU used
RAM: 512MB Physical

Benchmarks:
  utah-g3d "speed test"      174.65s

Ultra 60

OS: Solaris 2.7
RAM: 256 MB?

Benchmarks:
  utah-g3d "speed test"      142.0s

Phenom II x4 970 (3.5GHz)

OS: Linux 2.6.32 SMP - 1 of 4 cores
RAM: 8192 MB

Benchmarks:
  utah-g3d "speed test"      10.8s