[...]
On Wed, 4 Feb 1998, Chuck Carson wrote:
> 1) What is a BogoMIP?
One bogoMIP is one (million?) time(s) around an empty loop in one
second.
> 2) I have noticed that at boot time the system will calculate (?) the
> bogomips for each cpu add their combined total.
The point of bogomips is to be able to run n*bogos to pause for n seconds
exactly. Giving the sum of them is just a feature added to apease those who
use bogomips for bragging rights. (Note that bogomips make very poor
benchmarks: in real use, computers don't spend much time in empty loops).
Some might argue the majority of benchmarks aren't useful for more than just
bragging rights....
I _really_ like lmbench for the simple fact its really useful to actually
seem if some particular optimization or not has made an improvement.
[...]
Pentiums have highly varabile bogomipsage depending on just where the
loop is in memory. When you change the options a kernel is compiled
with, often locations change. It shouldn't matter, so long as the
calculation loop and the work loop have the same cache charactistics.
I think it also depends upon MMX/non-MMX by a _huge_ amount. Presumably the
improved BTB helps here.
-Chris