i386 vs amd64 - benchmark results

[Bob Willcox]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 07:57:06PM +0200, Martin wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I've tried two benchmarks to check the speed of my
> system on two FreeBSD architectures i386 and amd64.
> I've never seen anyone posting this kind of benchmark,
> so here is what I found out:
> 
> here the results of nbench:
> http://phpfi.com/71540
> 
> here is what openssl speed gives me:
> http://phpfi.com/71545
> 
> Sorry for posting it there, but I don't want to
> send attachments to this list.
> 
> Please notice the memory speed penalties while the
> system is running on amd64 kernel. I would like to
> know what causes this kind of low performance when
> memory is being accessed.
> 
> Is this a hardware problem or a problem with FreeBSD?
> Generally, FreeBSD-amd64 performs slightly better
> than FreeBSD-i386 and it's stable as expected, but
> I cannot find any solution to the memory problems
> that affect memory intensive applications as you can
> see.
> 
> Martin

As another data point, below is the nbench output from one of my
systems. It's an Athlon 64 3800+ w/ venice core running FreeBSD
6.0-BETA1. Motherboard is an ASUS A8V Deluxe (socket 939) with 1GB of
DDR400 RAM (2 512MB sticks).

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :            2326  :      59.65  :      19.59
STRING SORT         :          202.35  :      90.41  :      13.99
BITFIELD            :      5.2938e+08  :      90.81  :      18.97
FP EMULATION        :          153.36  :      73.59  :      16.98
FOURIER             :           18608  :      21.16  :      11.89
ASSIGNMENT          :          27.817  :     105.85  :      27.46
IDEA                :            3400  :      52.00  :      15.44
HUFFMAN             :          1869.4  :      51.84  :      16.55
NEURAL NET          :          24.696  :      39.67  :      16.69
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          1237.9  :      64.13  :      46.31
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 72.257
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 37.759
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 :
L2 Cache            :
OS                  : FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1
C compiler          : cc
libc                : /lib/libc.so.6
MEMORY INDEX        : 19.388
INTEGER INDEX       : 17.076
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 20.942
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

-- 
Bob Willcox                Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
bob at immure.com                     -- Lily Tomlin
Austin, TX