Re: AMD64 impressions (Re: AMD64 box)

[Hiten Pandya <hmp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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@xxxxxxxxxxxxx