AMD64 impressions (Re: AMD64 box)

Hiten Pandya hmp at backplane.com
Fri Nov 7 08:50:13 PST 2003


Matthew Dillon wrote:
    I was able to boot the AMD box with APMBIOS commented out (FreeBSD-4.x
    also can't boot the box with APMBIOS turned on either.  I'll test
    FreeBSD-current later today).
    I ran some preliminary buildworld benchmarks.  I don't have equivalent
    machines but a few things are obvious from the results:
    (1) The AMD box is very fast.  Very, very fast.  It blows away everything
	else hands down.  It is so fast that it spends nearly 1/3 of its
	time waiting on I/O despite the fact that the I/O requirements
	for a buildworld are fairly minimal.  It is so fast it makes my P4
	look like a snail, and even puts my DELL2550 (which is no slouch)
	to shame.
	I remember in some vague detail, Peter mentioned that one of the
	instructions in P4 takes about 800 cycles, which is only around
	15 cycles on the AMD64; which is pretty amazing. ;-)
	It might also help to look at the improvements that Peter has
	made to the FreeBSD's AMD64 support.
	Regards,

--
Hiten Pandya
hmp at xxxxxxxxxxxxx





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