Friday, March 15, 2002

Linpack

Thanks to Linpack, we have a good initial idea of the relative performance of our systems.

As you can see, the Athlon XP 2100+ hits the highest marks at around 64KB, and maintains its edge up until 92KB. At that point, the 2.2GHz "Northwood" quickly takes over, thanks in no small part to its 512KB L2 cache.

It's really interesting the 2100+'s performance relative to the XP 2000+ though. As you can see, the former turns in lower performance that its predecessor when the two begin making calls to main memory. The explanation is fairly straightforward: the SiS745 chipset of the 2100+'s test board is slightly slower in terms of main-memory performance.

Next: Winstone & Content creation 2001.