What do the results tell me?
The first thing I have to say is the following: Don’t get depressed if you do not have the fastest machine on earth, I don’t have it neither. But the results can show you some interesting details, for example the influence of the memory access cycles (x2222, x3333, ...) you can modify in your computers bios. It also shows you the advantages of disk controllers supporting busmastering. You don’t really need SCSI for this but the Intel PIIX IDE chipset found on all Triton and up based boards supports this, too (Only if you have a busmaster driver installed!). For such drivers look at the motherboard’s manufacturer’s website.
Here are some tips how to interpret the results:
For all of the tests except for the hard drive usage test: The higher the numbers the better. The hard drive usage test should be around 5%. If it’s 50 % and more look for a busmaster driver.
- Dhrystone:
This test should run fully in level 1 and 2 cache. The higher the clock rate of your CPU and the more sophisticated its architecture the better the results.
- Whetstone:
The higher the better. Usually this test runs fully in level 2 cache. If you’re system has very low results you probably do not have level 2 cache or it is switched to write through or you have a very slow CPU for floating point intensive applications. Matrix Operations: This depends on the type of CPU installed, the speed of it’s level 2 cache, it’s size and the CPU to level 2 cache bandwith. Xeon systems are usually the fastest. Of the level 2 cache is on the CPU itself, there is not much you can do to accelerate it, but if it’s on the board, check it’s bios settings.
- Eight Queens Problem:
Depends also on the level 2 cache and the CPU. The more sophisticated the CPU the better are the results (Prediction branches, length of the pipeline, and so on).
- Number Crunching:
If your CPU has a high clock rate and it can execute simple calculations in one or two clocks you’ll get good results.
- Floating point unit:
This depends mostly on your CPU. Intel processors are faster then Cyrix/IBM or AMD, but PowerPC or Alpha systems are even much faster.
- Memory throughput: Depends CPU to memory bus design and speed and the type of DRAM installed (RDRAM, DDR-SDRAM, SDRAM, EDO, Page Mode Ram,...) and how fast your motherboard can access it (read/write cycles, latency,...).
- Disk throughput:
Depends on the type of hard disk, its interface, the computers mass storage interface, the drivers your operating system uses, the file system on the disk, the size of the partition, and so on. If the maximum and the minimum values differ extremely, your hard disk is probably quite full or fragmented. If you get high CPU usage values your CPU has to do all I/O and there’s no busmastering (What a shame a some $100 chip and all it has to do is writing bytes on a disk!).