[CentOS] CPU benchmarking tools

Tom Brown tom at ng23.net
Fri Nov 14 14:56:54 UTC 2008


>
>
> Benchmarks are worthless - your apps count.
> Benchmark your applications. Period.

i dont think thats completely true as we would like to benchmark the 6 
core (dunnington), intel 4 core (harpertown) vs AMD shanghai, AMD 
Barcelona – as the disk / networking devices are handled by dom0, those 
elements won’t be as applicable as we’re looking mostly at the hardware 
enhancements in relation to page fault handling and TLB look-up speed, 
that the AMD Shanghai boasts about.

We wouldn't be benching I/O as that would increase the variability, 
which is why you wouldn't bother doing it; those kind of 
microbenchmark's would be applicable more for physical to virtualization 
microbencharks for linear regression calculations like:

U1/dom0 = c0 + c1 * M1/1 + c2 * M1/2 + ... + c11 * M1/11 etc

We're only interested in really the hardware benefits of the 
virtualization techniques in relation to the different cpu type. We're 
not interested exactly in the fact that it's virtualized, but knowing 
it's virtualized and process x has caused an interrupt, which has 
resulted in a page fault, which has made a TLB reference, which has 
resulted in paging etc, and has taken X period. If the Core improvements 
have said that page fault handles are processed quicker and TLB 
references have increased, then you should notice a big difference 
between VM1 in one environment without those to VM2 running with those 
hardware enhancements.





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