Hi Folks!

I recently replaced my 1.2G installation with the new UVM based current
snapshot. The new release is working well - congratulations again to the
arm32 team! 

I thought that it would be interesting to run the Byte benchmarks again
to see how far the system has come on in the last year, as well as to
see what difference UVM makes to overall system performance. 

There are moderate improvements overall, with a big gain in the
concurrent shell script tests (if anyone is interested in the detailed
reports, see ftp://ftp.physiol.ox.ac.uk/pub/neil.hoggarth/bytemarks/). 
One thing did alarm me though - we seem to have noticably *lost* FP
performance: 

1.2G:

Arithmetic Test (type = float)             3133.2 lps   (10 secs, 6 samples)
Arithmetic Test (type = double)            2697.9 lps   (10 secs, 6 samples)

1.3F with UVM:

Arithmetic Test (type = float)             1545.1 lps   (10 secs, 6 samples)
Arithmetic Test (type = double)             960.4 lps   (10 secs, 6 samples)

(The hardware is an Acorn RiscPC with a 200MHz SA110 processor and
32Mbytes RAM).

I haven't had a chance to do any other tests to see if this is a real
effect or whether it's something odd about the benchmark (and
unfortunately I don't have the 1.2 system to compare against anymore).

ISTR that the 1.2G private beta used the ARM FPE code, the same as the
current snapshot does, though I might be mistaken. Can anyone think why
there should such a big difference?

Regards,

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Neil Hoggarth                                 Departmental Computer Officer
<neil.hoggarth@physiol.ox.ac.uk>                   Laboratory of Physiology
http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~njh/                     Oxford University, UK
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