Well I've just read in this months RiscUser about the benchmarks for the
various ARM processors compared to PowerPC and Pentium processors, and I
must admit it was a bit quickly but I think they missed out a little bit
that might be quite important. Now then, the Pentium Pro (P6 200MHZ)
processor comes out at 280 kDhrystones/sec, (Unoptimized). The StrongARM
comes out at 340 kDhrystones/sec (Unoptimized). Now then the next test that
was carried out was a Chess program, and from reading that it was written in
ARM code I assume it is an integer test. What ever the code is like it was
not translated for the PowerPC or the Pentium processors. Now then does it
surprise you that the Whetstone test wasn't also carried out? Considering
that the multiply instruction is now apparently 40 times faster I would
think that some of the **emulated** floating point instructions would now
execute at a considerably faster rate. This leads me to another question,
could someone do this test on a StrongARM processor with RiscOS 3.7 and with
an emulator which is StrongARM compliant, and compare it to a PowerPC and a
Pentium of some sort? Then we could see how hobbled (or hopefully not) the
StrongARM processor is without an FPU.


Ratty