Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@ensta.fr> writes:

> 
> I have a cyrix 6x86-P150 (a 120 Mhz CPU) to test. I've run some private
> benchamrks on this CPU, and a pentium 120. I found the p120 from 15 to
> 50% fater in most of the case, and in all tests involving interger or
> float calculations. According to cyrix, the 6x86 should have been faster.

Are you using the CPUs in the same machine?  If not, how big are the
caches?  What kind of cache?  What speed are the memory and I/O busses
running at?  How fast is the memory?  EDO, FPM?  There are a huge
number of variables that could affect performance.

> At boot, NetBSD reports the CPU to be a "i486DX (486-class CPU)". Perhaps it
> doesn't make use of pentium-specific stuffs ?

Did you build the kernel with `options I586_CPU'?  If not, it will be
used like a 486.  For normal applications, this won't make any
noticable difference.