> [discussing speed of RM200 vs other R4600 machines, and BogoIPS:]
> .set noreorder
> 1: bnez reg,1b
> subu reg,1
>
> ... the first MIPS machine I ported Linux to - a Deskstation Tyne
> with a R4600/133MHz - needed three cycles to execute this loop while
> this machine seems to execute the loop in *one* cycle.
Bizarre. It should take 2 cycles/loop on *any* R4600, and 4
cycles/loop on an R4000/4400. I'd put money on it *not* taking one
cycle/loop - only an R10000 can do that! There are some unlikely
reasons I can think of for the difference (eg the loop spans a page
boundary and is in mapped space, when it will repeatedly have to do a
micro-tlb refill - but I'm sure you're in unmapped space).
> There are two versions of the R4600; my Tyne had version 1.0 as far as
> I remember while the SNI box has version 2.0. The 2.0 chip has some
> bugfixes; most important is probably the way it accesses primary caches.
> This bug can be worked around by disabeling interrupts during cacheflush
> or (untested ...) flushing way B before way A of the cache.
I don't recall anything on the published Rev 1 buglist which would
affect this. Now you've got me intrigued... I'd better go look this up!
> What type of benchmark would you account as real world benchmark?
Any modest set of reasonably large applications which can be compiled
without change on a number of different platforms, and run and timed
off test data. Perl/groff/emacs running scripts might be good.
I hoped this might have been so straightforward
between two Linux machines that someone had just done an informal
run-off.
> If you need "realworld" benchmarks probably some guy at MTI might supply
> you more representative data than I could.
MTI have commercial interests here, so it's not quite fair to expect
them to be objective.
> I've just booted the RM200 successfully via NFS. Time for porting
? Linux/MIPS to RM200 so far: a bit more than two days :->
Congratulations! we'd better try and find you one of our boards...
Dominic Sweetman
dom@algor.co.uk
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