Saving CPU clock for those tasks which worth the power on [Part 1]

Paving the way for an old thought

I've found an outdated text of mine, barely reformatted to fit this Blog. Oh! Gods, how much I hate blogs... It is from a visit I paid the last year to linuxhaxor.com. Quite a pretentious name but really a site one wants to visit from time to time.

Personal note: Aggregated --> to the feeds

Yeah, it works my way ..or not

Indeed I've found a nice article which made me think I was facing an unique proof of desktop cluttering, since a guy named Pavs had a Core 2 Duo processor running slower than my modest Turion ML-34 (1.8Ghz 32 bits mode) in crafty's CPU test. Yep! Childish assumption. My thought was his Desktop was draining bogomips from the test. However this is true, the difference in performance turned out to be that he had run the test in a single core, thus exhibiting the power of just one of the guns in his arsenal.

Core 2 Duo 1.6G (No more info) Total nodes: 36247629 Raw nodes per second: 1169278 Total elapsed time: 31

Anyway, the lesson learned from that simple "benchmark" test was that my processor was running quite well comparing some results I achieved from a virtual console:

Turion 64 ML-34 Console Total nodes: 36247629 Raw nodes per second: 1249918 Total elapsed time: 29

Then a pleasing ratpoison visual environment with nine Firefox tabs opened, three terminals and another two applications which I cannot recall at this very moment gave good results too:

Turion 64 ML-34 Visual Environment Total nodes: 36247629 Raw nodes per second: 1208254 Total elapsed time: 30

My final thoughts

It appears that Turions aren't as slow as some popular benchmark sites claim anyway [...] In this days of falling markets, non -even- 65nm AMDs are yet useful enough to power home servers ;) Whereas they are not so wattage conscious, the computing power they drive make them more than acceptable for those tasks. My lovely HP Pavilion dv8000 series whose display is not in use anymore, provides good backup, monitoring and farming capabilities whenever I am or not at home. Besides, nowadays, I hate HP notebooks and laptops with passion (El Cheap'O components and an extreme tendency to failure in all cases I am aware of). That's the magic of free *nixes anyway. Extensive Intel products aimed at gamers and moronic business people ie. i7 are just great this days. Tough, for the sake of money consciousness, computers out of market are a terrific service for those who can squish the juice out of them (eg. Linus Torvalds and his Pentium III laptop exhibited at googletalks git conference) You don't have to be a Linus to do greater than that. Final note: Crafty chess engine is currently available for most BSD and Linux distributions. If you want to compile from source yourself, get the code from: www.craftyches.com Tests for different processors and architectures are to be found in: craftybenchmarks This sources provide an excellent base to check out whether you are missing bogomips because of your *nix distribution. Enjoy breaking your neck!