I have a choice of 2 CPUs for my ex-skip Linux box: Intel P166-MMX (166MHz) or ST 6x86-166+ (133MHz). According to Norton SI under DOS, the MMX scores 580, whilst the 6x scores nearly 800, although both are reported as being a 486. However, when Linux boots, it reports 330 bogomips for the MMX but only about 160 for the 6x. I have two versions of the kernel 2.4.9, one optimised for the MMX and the other for the 6x.
So the question is: which CPU will make Linux run faster? And will I notice the difference? Other system specs are RAM 64Mb, PCI bus, 256k PBSRAM cache.
Gerald.
on Fri, Nov 23, 2001 at 09:05:46AM +0000, Edenyard wrote:
I have a choice of 2 CPUs for my ex-skip Linux box: Intel P166-MMX (166MHz) or ST 6x86-166+ (133MHz). According to Norton SI under DOS, the MMX scores 580, whilst the 6x scores nearly 800, although both are reported as being a 486. However, when Linux boots, it reports 330 bogomips for the MMX but only about 160 for the 6x. I have two versions of the kernel 2.4.9, one optimised for the MMX and the other for the 6x.
So the question is: which CPU will make Linux run faster? And will I notice the difference? Other system specs are RAM 64Mb, PCI bus, 256k PBSRAM cache.
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/BogoMips-2.html has more information about the relevancy of bogomips for speed measurement.
At these speeds you are probably unlikely to notice much difference in speed. You might want to compare /proc/cpuinfo for both cpus, specifically the cache size and cpu speed detected there should help. Generally, a bigger cache size is better and is commonly a place where Intel clones have less than a real Intel chip.
There are several benchmarking programs that run under linux. lmbench is one of them http://www.bitmover.com/lmbench/ nbench is another http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html
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Edenyard -
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