wrfblog

Bill Fraser


wrf


Archives
2010 June
Valve
Win
2010 May
2010 February
2010 January
2009 October
2009 September
2009 April
2009 February
2009 January
2008 July
2008 May
2008 April
2008 March


Welcome back.
» forget me


Subscribe:
email:


Login:
password:
An Interesting Processor Comparison
Fri October 9th, 2009 at 9:22 PM PDT
My latest Computer Science assignment involved a large amount of number crunching and text processing, and seeing as how I have a large assortment of computers around my apartment, I figured I'd try them all out and see how they stacked up. The results proved quite surprising.

The data I needed to process was a large text file (10680 lines), where each line had a source IP address, a destination IP address, and various network statistics. I wrote two scripts to process this: the first took each IP address, looked it up in a file that mapped IPs to latitude-longitude pairs (816 lines long), and printed lines with the address substituted for the location. The second script took these two locations and calculated the distance on the globe between them.

Script #1, for each input line, grep'd the ip-location map twice (once for source, once for dest), and printed the new line with the IPs substituted for locations.

Script #2, for each line, ran a perl script that used the Math::Trig module to compute the great circle distance between the locations, and printed the new line with the locations substituted for the distance between them.

These scripts were run as a pipeline, so as to take advantage of dual-core processors:
% scripts/ip-loc-translate.sh < data/raw.txt \
| scripts/loc-dist-translate.sh > data/post-processed.txt


The Machines
System NameProcessorProcessor SpeedUser TimeSystem Time
Delta-ZeroAMD AthlonXP 2100+1x 1733 MHz348.61 s107.19 s
ElementAMD Athlon64 3200+1x 2000 MHz291.663 s143.437 s
SkylightIntel Core Duo T20502x 1600 MHz1205.708 s189.748 s


Yes, that's correct. The Core Duo was more than THREE TIMES SLOWER than the old crusty AthlonXP at this test, despite being able to take full advantage of the parallellized script, being dual-core. For the life of me, I can't figure out why. Both AMD machines are using DDR ram, whereas the Core Duo is using faster DDR2. The Core Duo has 2MB of on-chip cache, the Athlon64 has 1MB, and the AtlonXP only has 256K.

It just goes to show how good those AMD processors are. I often rip on that AthlonXP as being the hottest-running chip I've ever seen (it regularly hits 60+ degress Celcius at idle), but it's still plenty good at doing things that matter.
» (0 comments) (make a comment)


Name: (optional; defaults to "Anonymous")
Tripcode: (optional) What's a tripcode?
Link: (optional)
Image Verification: =
Message:
—»   
notice: — Allowed HTML tags: <b> <i> <u> <p> <br> <a href="" name=""> <ol> <ul> <li> <em> <strong> <strike> <font color="" size=""> <tt> <blockquote> <sub> <sup>
— You do not need to use <br> tags - hitting the enter key will suffice.
— Text in the form of "@[number]:" will be made into a link to the comment with that number (must be in the current post).
— You cannot not edit or delete your comment once it has been posted, so please thoroughly review it before posting.
— Posting constitutes acceptance of these terms.
Thanks!
Shoutbox
Anonymous:
lonely shoutbox :(
Mon April 7th, 2008 at 5:09 PM PDT
Anonymous:
hello
Mon April 7th, 2008 at 5:12 PM PDT
Anonymous:
o hai
Mon April 28th, 2008 at 12:31 PM PDT
CHIZUBAGA:
I CAN HAZ CHIZUBAGA!!!!!!!
Wed January 20th, 2010 at 12:58 PM PST
Not Jeremy:
o hai remember when i threw hot sauz in yer eye. lulz
Thu January 28th, 2010 at 11:28 AM PST
JEREMY:
MOAR NAPKINS DURR HURR
Thu February 11th, 2010 at 9:33 AM PST
Shoutbox:
I wuz on a DAtZ.. haffing chizubaga!! Om nom nom nom!!
Wed May 26th, 2010 at 1:04 PM PDT
Totally not anyone you know:
Problem?
Thu June 3rd, 2010 at 2:09 PM PDT
Random Randomstein:
Shitpickle.
Fri June 11th, 2010 at 6:04 PM PDT
Anti-spam field (don't enter anything! This field shouldn't really display at all - something is wrong...):
Name:
Link:
Text:
Anti-spam field (don't enter anything!):



21 database queries. Page generated in 109 milliseconds.
Powered by: CodewiseBlog Mainline v2.1.0.17-DEV
CodewiseBlog © 2004-2010 William R. Fraser / Codewise.org.
All textual content is the property of its author, subject to terms.
CodewiseBlog is free software under the GNU General Public License
CWB