Comparative CPU Benchmarks From 1995 to 2004

Lux writes "The guys over at Tom's Hardware Guide have been busy recently! They've compared over a hundred different architectures dating all the way back to the Pentium 1 in one huge benchmarking effort. Looking to upgrade an older system? Unlike most benchmarks, which compare modern systems to other modern systems, these charts can help you figure out if the cost of upgrading is worth the speedup or if you should hold off for a bit longer."

Comments

100 architectures?!

[Jhan]

Actually, they only benchmark one architecture, x86. A real shame, I would love to see a thorough comparison of *multiple* processor architectures over a long period of time.

Re:100 architectures?!

[Rebar]

Okay, since Tom's is completely dead at the moment, I'll share the results of my own useless benchmark. I ran the very same single-threaded stupid command on several different machines and recorded user time. Users enter stupid commands anyway, so I figure this is as good as any other test.

I did say this is useless, right? Good. Note that most of these machines are multi-cpu machines, and it looks like I only did this on Power4, PPC, Intel and AMD, and Alpha systems.

My stupid command is:
dd if=/dev/zero bs=32768 count=3200 | time gzip > /dev/null

Here are the machines and the USER-time result in seconds:

MHz Secs CPU Arch
3185 1.04 Intel Xeon CPU 3.20GHz
3057 1.08 Intel Xeon CPU 3.06GHz
2795 1.22 Intel Xeon MP CPU 2.80GHz
2786 1.22 Intel Xeon CPU 2.80GHz
2395 1.39 Intel Xeon CPU 2.40GHz
1800 2.00 AMD Athlon 64 Processor
1533 2.44 AMD Athlon MP 1800+
1300 3.18 IBM Power4
1108 3.69 IBM P690 Power4
1108 3.71 IBM P690 Power4
1000 4.36 EV6.8CB
1150 4.4 EV7 21364
1000 4.79 AMD Duron OC 133FSB
1000 5.1 EV6.8CB 21264C
1000 5.37 PIII Xeon Coppermine core
1000 5.5 PowerPC RS64-IV
866 5.76 PIII Coppermine core
700 6.1 EV6.7 21264A
500 12.36 PIII Katmai core
600 14.9 EV5
400 14.99 AMD K6
350 17.23 Pentium 2
532 19 EV5.6 21164A
300 27.14 Pentium MMX
300 34 EV5

Due to the Lameness Filter, I can't make the above data any prettier, but I'd bet you can figure it out.

Of course with differences in OS, compilers, memory speeds, etc. you can't really draw any conclusions from this, EXCEPT this is how fast this particular command runs on these exact systems, AND you can run it on yours to compare how fast a stupid command will finish, which is good to know.

--rebar

The title of this newspiece is misleading!

[chaoskitty]

"Comparative CPU Benchmarks From 1995 to 2004"

I only see x86 CPUs. What about the PowerPCs, SPARCs, MIPS, Alphas, ARMs, and so on?

For instance, the m68060 was the first consumer level processor with branch prediction and branch folding, superscalar dispatch, and real-world throughput of more than one instruction per clock cycle. Except for floating point where it performed only modestly, the m68060 seriously outperformed the Pentium in spite of only having a 32 bit data bus as compared with the Pentium's 64 bit bus. Isn't this significant in illustrating the influences in processor architecture?

http://www.sixgirls.org/ is an m68060 Amiga running NetBSD 2.0. Still very useful after all this time. Where are all those Pentium 60 machines?

Re:Upgrade

[stratjakt]

This site says different, it lists:

80487 Intel 487 SX CPGA SZ494, USA

Another forum I found has this to say, which is interesting (take it with a grain of salt, I don't vouch for what "RatBoy" says)

Intel created an inferior version of the CPU in the SX, but remember they did the same thing with the 386 SX and DX. There was a nasty rumour that the 486 SX was created only because a batch of 486 chips had faulty FPUs and this was a way for Intel to sell damaged goods and still make some money on them. This rumour was helped out when Intel introduced the 487 math co-processor for the 486 SX. It turned out the 487 was really a 486 DX with one extra pin whose job it was to completely shutdown the 486 SX when you plugged the 487 into your motherboard next to the 486 SX!

Either way, there was (is) a 487.