BOGOMips, CPU speed, compile times and cache

Baard Johannessen (bardj@utopia.ppp.sn.no)
Sun, 14 Jul 1996 09:31:36 +0100

There where some talk here a few weeks back about the usefullness of the
BOGOMips number. A lot of people seemed to think that compile times was
a better way to messure CPU preformance (at least when RAM was not an issue).

I decided to add another 128KBytes cache yesterday, and thought I'd see
how that influenced compile times. Here if what I found:

In both cases I booted the computer, cd to /usr/src/linux/, make mrproper,
make menuconfig, loaded a saved config, make dep, make clean, and then ran:

time make zImage

The results where:

128KBytes cache:

User: 1634.55
System: 87.53
Elapsed: 29:17.45

256KBytes cache:

User: 1091.30
System: 82.78
Elapsed: 20:08.36

Just wanted to add my 2 cents.

Flames via eMail, followups to the list :)

bardj (on his way out the door to get 1MByte cache)