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FP performance
FP performance
Posted Feb 5, 2007 21:54 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1)In reply to: Comparing Linux and Minix by evgeny
Parent article: Comparing Linux and Minix
My assumption (really just a guess) is that Minix lacks proper support for the FPU, so the compiler is built to emulate all floating-point operations. It seems like a minor detail; it's hard to imagine that the other tests make any significant use of floating-point.
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FP performance
Posted Feb 5, 2007 22:06 UTC (Mon) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]
Well, all results are FP numbers, so at least some FP operations are used in every test. If the FP performance counters are updates inside the loops, this might me essential (since the emulated FP is orders of magnitude slower). It would be interesting to force Linux to use emulated FP and re-run the tests (or run the benchmarks on a 386SX box ;-)).