Rewriting SuperPi

Any comments are welcomed here.

Do you think it would be wise for me to invest my time in trying to create a new "SuperPi", removing all the access to the disk (to hopefully decrease the time taken to calculate all of the digits), and renewing the UI so it is basic Windows, and maybe making it a more serious benchmark than it already is?

If so, would anyone like to recommend an algorithm or method to calculate pi to 33 554 432 places (32mb)?

I would also hope to be able to make it to be able to calculate even more, and be multi threaded.

Post anything, even post "no, leave it alone, its perfect, don't touch it".

Thank you.

I would say you should removing access to the disk so that we would not have to have 2 raptors in raid in order to get better times. Then it would just be cpu dependent.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by cajer

I would say you should removing access to the disk so that we would not have to have 2 raptors in raid in order to get better times. Then it would just be cpu dependent.

---

Good to hear from you cajer, and hope to see you next week.

And, definitely. The main goal of removing disk access is because it breaks your calculation into 7 files, and stores it there.

As far as multi thread, the number of digits would be divided by 2 or 4 (depending on the amount of cores, 1 thread could be run too) and then calculated on each core.

I could see this going places.

Personally I would like to see it happen since the hdd accessing so much runs against the idea of a "cpu" benchmark. Multi threaded support (which hyperpi also has i think - except it runs 4 instances of pi calc. I dont think it divides the work of 1 calc between the cores) and a new UI would be a welcome addition. Most important things are stability/predictability (wont give widely deviant scores on same hardware/os setup) and efficientcy so that it scales well as clock speeds ramp up.

The key would be to have hwbot support behind it. I would talk to massman or richbastard about this. I think widespread adoption would happen instantly if hwbot accepts it for points (or even just for submissions to start or something).

Ehm isn't this talk just what Wprime was built on/decided on?

Just wondering lol.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Marvin_The_Martian

Ehm isn't this talk just what Wprime was built on/decided on?

Just wondering lol.

---

Yeah, wPrime is an awesome benchmark.
But with the recent fluctuation between versions, I don't know.

If you want to code a new benchmark try to do a own benchmark, not Super Pi Mod MuffinFlavored-version. ;)
Super Pi is so popular because it is like it is. :yepp:
IMHO a new benchmark should have a good runtime, new CPU architectures can decrease it very easy (just compare A64 - C2D :eek: ).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Hyperhorn

If you want to code a new benchmark try to do a own benchmark, not Super Pi Mod MuffinFlavored-version. ;)
Super Pi is so popular because it is like it is. :yepp:
IMHO a new benchmark should have a good runtime, new CPU architectures can decrease it very easy (just compare A64 - C2D :eek: ).

---

That is what I was aiming for. I wasn't going to just build on top of SuperPi.
I just meant something similar to it. A CPU benchmark that calculates, something.

Sounds good to me, especially multithreaded would be nice but honestly would it even work to split the calculations to different cores? Isn't that the problem with multithreaded nowadays, you have to let cores do specific tasks rather than try and focus several cores one thing.

How could this be done? I'm curious about it too. Anyways, sounds like an awesome idea.

Like the sound of it! will be interesting to see how much faster it works...

wPrime and superpi have nothing to do with eachother

wprime sucks in testing RAM......RAM has very little impact on wPrime where it's supersensitive to superpi :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by RPGWiZaRD

Sounds good to me, especially multithreaded would be nice but honestly would it even work to split the calculations to different cores? Isn't that the problem with multithreaded nowadays, you have to let cores do specific tasks rather than try and focus several cores one thing.

---

If you do a run of wPrime, and you set, say 4 threads, you will see it say "running sqrts of x to x on thread x"

If you set it to 1 thread, it will say "running sqrts of 0 to 3000"
If you set it to 2 threads, it will say "1. running sqrts of 0 to 1500 2. running sqrts of 1501 to 3000".

I know how to do everything, EXCEPT the benchmark. I need something to take up cycles besides n = n + 1

:p

I think it would be nice if it could use 4... maybe 8+ cores efficiently. Couldnt you make it access the memory instead of the disk? That would surely help make it a cpu only test, no?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ZOMGVTEK

I think it would be nice if it could use 4... maybe 8+ cores efficiently. Couldnt you make it access the memory instead of the disk? That would surely help make it a cpu only test, no?

---

I can make it access the CPU only (kind of).

I mean, I made a simple benchmark. (i = i + 1; square root of i; see how big i gets in 1 minute, that is score)
It creates a 100% load, generates heat.

But I want it to be more complex, more efficient.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by dinos22

wPrime and superpi have nothing to do with eachother

wprime sucks in testing RAM......RAM has very little impact on wPrime where it's supersensitive to superpi :D

---

I was not talking about benching perspective but about programming perspective. Wprime was made to offer a multithreaded superpi equivalent. That there is to much score variations now due to diffrent versions and that the benchers ( you ) don't like how tweakable it is, was not wat I was saying.

Gl Muffinflavoured btw, you seem to get more positive reactions then I did ;)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by dinos22

wPrime and superpi have nothing to do with eachother

wprime sucks in testing RAM......RAM has very little impact on wPrime where it's supersensitive to superpi :D

---

I agree, thats why SPI is 10x more fun than wprime!

I just need a way to benchmark the CPUs.
After that, I can make it less memory dependent, more CPU dependent, anything.

I just need a base.

Why don't you make it exctally like super pi 1.5 but remove the hard drive dependent part? That way it would be more likely for other people to accpet it. It might ever become super pi 1.6. ;)

yes please!

I just found out SuperPi uses the Gauss-Legendre algorithm to calculate pi.

I will hopefully have a beta up within a few hours.

this should be interesting... may i beta test?

I have a couple different pairs of ram including TG DDR2-10,400 (1300MHz) 2GB

look here, too.

http://gmplib.org/pi-with-gmp.html

Our Super Pi will stay our version, muffinflavored pi or whatever you want to call it to avoid any confusion.

But go nuts on making your version, Im not one to hold anyone back from succeeding, just dont do it thinking you are replacing Super Pi.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Qkjhfhaiguihfma

look here, too.

http://gmplib.org/pi-with-gmp.html

---

clearly issues there if Core2 cannot beat AMD chips at faster clocks even :rolleyes:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by FUGGER

Our Super Pi will stay our version, muffinflavored pi or whatever you want to call it to avoid any confusion.

But go nuts on making your version, Im not one to hold anyone back from succeeding, just dont do it thinking you are replacing Super Pi.

---

That is not my goal. :)

Everyone might be seeing this as more than it really is.
I am just trying to calculate an x amount of digits of pi, and see how long it takes.
I do not know if the memory usage will be amazing, or anything.
Hopefully in the end, it will be that way.

If anyone knows anything about the Gauss-Legendre algorithm for calculating pi, let me know.

i hope it will be even faster cuz ram is faster than any hd.

So far, I can calculate 16 digits of pi correctly.

Code:

---

        long double a = 1.0;
        long double b = 1.0/sqrt(2.0);
        long double t = 1.0/4.0;
        long double p = 1.0;
        long double temp, pi;

        int digits = 4;
        int n = 1;

        while (n <= digits) {
                temp = a;
                a = (a+b)/2.0;
                b = sqrt(temp*b);
                t = t - (p * pow(temp - a, 2.0));
                p = 2.0 * p;
                n++;
        }

        pi = pow(a+b, 2)/(4*t);
        printf("&#37;lf\n", pi);

---

I am trying to avoid the use of an external library to support large numbers.
"long double" allows only 128 bits (16 bytes) to be stored.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MuffinFlavored

So far, I can calculate 16 digits of pi correctly.

Code:

---

        long double a = 1.0;
        long double b = 1.0/sqrt(2.0);
        long double t = 1.0/4.0;
        long double p = 1.0;
        long double temp, pi;

        int digits = 4;
        int n = 1;

        while (n <= digits) {
                temp = a;
                a = (a+b)/2.0;
                b = sqrt(temp*b);
                t = t - (p * pow(temp - a, 2.0));
                p = 2.0 * p;
                n++;
        }

        pi = pow(a+b, 2)/(4*t);
        printf("&#37;lf\n", pi);

---

I am trying to avoid the use of an external library to support large numbers.
"long double" allows only 128 bits (16 bytes) to be stored.

---

What spi does, is save temporary results to hdd/ram which is why it's so tweakable. You won't get far if you only use built in data types you have to store intermediate results somewhere.

Edit:

Or, just combine data types, eg double 'long double' where the first one has prefaced 0's. Actually it's the same as I said above as you're doubling the variables which are used to hold the data, so it will double the ram usage, and at some point the os might start using the swap file for some reason.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Marvin_The_Martian

What spi does, is save temporary results to hdd/ram which is why it's so tweakable. You won't get far if you only use built in data types you have to store intermediate results somewhere.

Edit:

Or, just combine data types, eg double 'long double' where the first one has prefaced 0's. Actually it's the same as I said above as you're doubling the variables which are used to hold the data, so it will double the ram usage, and at some point the os might start using the swap file for some reason.

---

The way the algorithm I was using worked, it returned twice the amount of digits calculated each time. That is not good.

Trying a digit extracting method, I can get much better results.
But the method I have now, takes a very long time to calculate 16384 digits of pi (16kb)

But, I have this question.

What does everyone perfer:
a pi calculating benchmark
or a prime calculating benchmark

I think the algorithm doesn't matter to most, calculating prime numbers well you can use P95 for that and calculating pi I think that's done already to idk how many digits.

People will care about how tweakable the benchmark is, and about how consistent the scaling will be ( eg predictability so you can weed out any scores which are simply bugged or cheated ). Best would be a cheat safe bench offcourse.

My .02c.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Marvin_The_Martian

I think the algorithm doesn't matter to most, calculating prime numbers well you can use P95 for that and calculating pi I think that's done already to idk how many digits.

People will care about how tweakable the benchmark is, and about how consistent the scaling will be ( eg predictability so you can weed out any scores which are simply bugged or cheated ). Best would be a cheat safe bench offcourse.

My .02c.

---

I would very well like to make something, new.
If anyone knows anything that would stress a CPU (I am now even trying to write some DirectX 9 applications), please let me know.
I will attempt to implement it.

So, you know HOW to do, but you don't know WHAT to do? ;)

What about doing soemthing GRAPHICAL instead? Software rendering.

What about doing the "plasma effect" from oldie intros/demos? Don't use LUTs, calculate everything over and over again for every pixel, with cosines and sines.

Basic idea goes like this:
go trough every pixel in the screen (with for(){}'s).
calculate pixel color (e.g. c = 128cos((x*y)/120)*64+sin(x/50+y/30)*48+cos((y/x)*60)/16
set pixel on the appropriate point on the screen(direct framebuffer access would be way faster though).
loop for 2 minutes.
calculate the amount of rendered frames.

You can put huge amounts of load to a CPU if you don't use LUTs and use big resolutions. Think about 1600*1200*10 trigonometric functions in one second. Too fast? Add more complex formula.

It doesn't really matter what it renders, as long as it renders, with CPU. ;) I'd be interested to watch some kind of an effect rather than "Calculating... Please wait..."-text for over and over again. Oh, and whatever you do, please, do it cross-platform in mind.

Or what about image rotating? HUGE maze generation? 3D rendering? Fractal rendering? There is SO much what you can do, just be creative. ;)

Have you muffinflavored seen this thread?

Maybe you would be better off coding the stuff calmatory said.

I'm not against you rewriting SuperPi but it seems to me that there is already many versions of the same thing. :shrug:

You are right.
I need to create a DirectX 9 benchmark that heavily uses the CPU.

2 in 1 bonus.

I have already started.

Why to include DX?

DX with few cubes, textures, simple shaders and some primitive lighting techniques is about the same for the GPU as the 1+1 is for the CPU - VERY poor idea. Either you need to stress, stress alot, and even more, or not stress at all.

Besides, unless you really are going to STRESS the GPU, it will be CPU-bound, and then the DirectX implementation is just waste of time. You can get graphics with CPU aswell. Every 3DMark, including 3DMark06 are CPU bound, are you aiming alone higher than Futuremark went with full team of professionals?

So, make one good, instead of two poor benches, I am fairly certain that 1+1 = 2 isn't good in this case.

And no, I am not trying to put you down or anything, just saying what I think. ;)

(Well, tbh, I believe SuperPI is being #1 because it has HWBot etc. support. It's de facto. ;) If you ask me, NucRus MultiCore benchmark, or wPrime would be better benches than SuperPI, but SPI is a legend, and nothing is going to take it away, no matter how good it is/what it stresses. Sad but true. :( I'd personally be more interested in wPrime/NucRus etc. Or 3D Software renderer.)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Calmatory

Why to include DX?

DX with few cubes, textures, simple shaders and some primitive lighting techniques is about the same for the GPU as the 1+1 is for the CPU - VERY poor idea. Either you need to stress, stress alot, and even more, or not stress at all.

Besides, unless you really are going to STRESS the GPU, it will be CPU-bound, and then the DirectX implementation is just waste of time. You can get graphics with CPU aswell. Every 3DMark, including 3DMark06 are CPU bound, are you aiming alone higher than Futuremark went with full team of professionals?

So, make one good, instead of two poor benches, I am fairly certain that 1+1 = 2 isn't good in this case.

And no, I am not trying to put you down or anything, just saying what I think. ;)

(Well, tbh, I believe SuperPI is being #1 because it has HWBot etc. support. It's de facto. ;) If you ask me, NucRus MultiCore benchmark, or wPrime would be better benches than SuperPI, but SPI is a legend, and nothing is going to take it away, no matter how good it is/what it stresses. Sad but true. :( I'd personally be more interested in wPrime/NucRus etc. Or 3D Software renderer.)

---

I guess I must have said something wrong in my first post.

I am not trying to replace 3DMark.
I am not trying to replace SuperPi.
I am not trying to replace wPrime.
I am not trying to "replace" existing benchmarks.

I was just going to see if I could "program" a very stressing CPU benchmark, and then try and mutli-thread it.

I know 1+1 is not stressing.
I know drawing individual pixels is not stressing.

I will attempt to make something difficult, stressing, and worth while.

All I can do is try. :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MuffinFlavored

I just need a way to benchmark the CPUs.
After that, I can make it less memory dependent, more CPU dependent, anything.

---

That will just make it more biased to Core 2 chips with their huge cache, but no onboard memory controller.

try something like FFT or DFT? very intensive

Basically people "care" about how their CPU band is doing in benches. If AMD beats Intel in wPrime and Nucrus(don't heat up please, just an example! ;)) then Intelists shout for "real world benches" or tell that Intel > AMD since Intel is faster in SuperPI. Same goes if Intel > AMD. It just depends who you ask about, but generally people care about "real world" (read: Crysis, 3Dmark CPU benches, SuperPI & Pifast and maybe CINEBENCH.).

So what you might wanna do is to stress the CPU in multiple ways. Integer division and multiplying. Floating-point D/M, bitshifting, string manipulation. base10 to base16 conversions and vice versa, trigonometric functions...

If there is such a benchmark which really tests that all(Lets call it X), STILL people want to see "real world" benches, despite that the benchmark X tests for even WIDER variety of features than average "real world" bench.

Pretty much screwed, aye? :(

Well, not really unless one aims to make a benchmark which people care about and think it being the best meter for CPU speed (Which it could in reality be, thanks to wide variety of features tested). But after all, the main idea and motivator is the will to learn and experiment, right? :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Calmatory

Basically people "care" about how their CPU band is doing in benches. If AMD beats Intel in wPrime and Nucrus(don't heat up please, just an example! ;)) then Intelists shout for "real world benches" or tell that Intel > AMD since Intel is faster in SuperPI. Same goes if Intel > AMD. It just depends who you ask about, but generally people care about "real world" (read: Crysis, 3Dmark CPU benches, SuperPI & Pifast and maybe CINEBENCH.).

So what you might wanna do is to stress the CPU in multiple ways. Integer division and multiplying. Floating-point D/M, bitshifting, string manipulation. base10 to base16 conversions and vice versa, trigonometric functions...

If there is such a benchmark which really tests that all(Lets call it X), STILL people want to see "real world" benches, despite that the benchmark X tests for even WIDER variety of features than average "real world" bench.

Pretty much screwed, aye? :(

Well, not really unless one aims to make a benchmark which people care about and think it being the best meter for CPU speed (Which it could in reality be, thanks to wide variety of features tested). But after all, the main idea and motivator is the will to learn and experiment, right? :)

---

Very true. From what you are saying, it seems the end result in comparison to other peoples end results almost matters more than the benchmark itself.

Yes, I am in it for the learning and experimentation, and the fellow members of XS could be, sort of "beta testers".

If you ever need a tester, feel free to count me in! ;)

Shall I ask you what kind of C++ experience do you have? i.e how much? When did you start, what heve you done so far? Other languages? Just curious. ;)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Calmatory

If you ever need a tester, feel free to count me in! ;)

Shall I ask you what kind of C++ experience do you have? i.e how much? When did you start, what heve you done so far? Other languages? Just curious. ;)

---

A tester? Didn't you send me the code of the ASM benchmarks? You need to be writing with me!

To be honest, I have, I guess what people would call "minimum" C/C++ experience. I kind of combined the two when I was learning, but now I am trying to stick with C.

I am 14 years old, I started by just reading a couple of tutorials, and I went from there.

I know a lot of PHP, Python, and C/C++ (I think of them as the close relatives :p:)

And ever since you sent me that CPU Bench 1.02 source code, I have been reading about ASM opcodes. :p:

Do you want to do some sort of combined project?

Hmm, you must be mixing up me with someone else, since as far as I know, I haven't sent anyone anything related to ASM benchmarks, as I don't even know ASM well enough.

Why don't you want to use external libraries? The clock() in time.h is AWFULLY inaccurate(Running time for my plasmas were over 14 seconds, whereas it should have stopped right after 10 seconds were passed.) under heavy CPU load, thus there is no accurate way of measuring time.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Calmatory

Hmm, you must be mixing up me with someone else, since as far as I know, I haven't sent anyone anything related to ASM benchmarks, as I don't even know ASM well enough.

Why don't you want to use external libraries? The clock() in time.h is AWFULLY inaccurate(Running time for my plasmas were over 14 seconds, whereas it should have stopped right after 10 seconds were passed.) under heavy CPU load, thus there is no accurate way of measuring time.

---

:confused: Then who sent me those benchmarks?

I should find a better way to measure time, but by external libraries, I meant a bignum library, because I felt it would not provide the best performance.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MuffinFlavored

Yeah, wPrime is an awesome benchmark.
But with the recent fluctuation between versions, I don't know.

---

The author commented quite clearly that official stable is still 1.55 and other newer builds having problems are not yet stable and unofficial for the exact reason. They will be improved and quickened up quite a bit before official release build according to him ;)

As for something which creates heat and computers Pi, check SuperPrime developed by a fella on here. The best CPU/RAM test I've played with since Linpack, beats Linpack 32b for stress and heat and shows up errors very quickly. Cheat-preventative, picks up system details through CPUZ too [which was a problem for long], better than wPrime does. One major downside to it is, it only runs on Intel platforms. :(

I have no idea why Charles hasn't updated and made Super Pi more efficient, I know many fellas have complained and advised for it many times over the years. One good reason is, you get to compare from the beginning to the end across all platforms - single threaded, single channel performance. Why Charles doesn't release the source code is one major reason you should be careful with it too -> to limit the cheating.

No calculation that isn't a specific memory test out there yet that I've come across is RAM intensive or much sensitive until you get into the high memory footprint periods of code. Something like SysTool Pi is more RAM intensive than most apps around. PhotoWorxx in EVEREST and WinRAR is about the best I've seen that are quite RAM/FSB intensive, much more than others anyway. A very good memory subsystem benchmark is STREAM, all professionals incl. hardware firms use it and yeah, they tend to compete in it :p: Maybe you can take pointers from that since IIRC it is coded in C as well as Fortran, the source code is available and STREAM2 is being developed currently.

As for Intel/AMD, you should ignore zealot and bias individuals or those with little understanding of uarch functioning and neutralize your benchmark to be platform independent and still remain consistent across processor generations and core improvements - i.e. it can't be showing Pentium 4 faster per MHz than Penryn in integer calcs for instance. Check out Intel documentation on ILP, TLP, PLP at their website, their software developer community covers quite a lot of information and hints. Check out Linpack source code for good pointers too, I know this is how many other devs start off building good benchmarks. ;)
That's what SPEC did when developing the CPU 2006 benchmark and hence why all professional firms compete and rely in it, since they govern the benchmarking affair officially. Both CPU MFG firms have different strengths, weaknesses and dependencies as all data analyzers and coders will know. If you use code optimized running instructions which favor AMD, it will win and if you use the opposite the Intel will win. You can see the instruction and bench types which favor Intel and AMD in this 2.83G Harpertown and 2.3G Barcelona comparison. If you took Gamess for instance, the AMD CPU would outclass the Intel one. But if you took PovRay for example, the Intel CPU would outclass the AMD one. Different code, different strengths, no one brush fits all :yepp:

There really is a strong need to get some multi-threaded version that is RAM intensive out. All CPU MFGs are now moving to decrease data bottlenecks in their core uarchs in buses and increase cache, inter-core, intra-core and RAM bandwidth massively to enable fast computations with improved energy efficiency. Problem is, if the applications and benchmarks around are not coded to take benefit of them, their new instruction sets, their multi-cores, their memory, cache and bus performances, the end result will be useless to show the system perf. and the application might very well run slower on newer urachs then older ones per clock which were single threaded with little memory bandwidth. Everything is being improved for multithreaded parallelism, coding needs to take in account compilers/languages, their optimizations, operational semantics, functional languages, extensions, higher-order functions, polymorphism, non-determinism and so on that exploit parallelism best. Maybe have a look into lambda calculus too.

As for coding, my coding is v.weak now so I'm reserved in what I say, I have no interest in it nor the time. I quit in late 2005 and have not touched it since then apart from Firefox/Thunderbird related coding and whatever comes with its debugging.

EDIT: this might help you. QPi is utilizing the most efficient algorithm I've used, although there may well be better implmentations of it close to the actual: http://www.geocities.com/tsrmath/pi/piprogs.html#QPI

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KTE

The author commented quite clearly that official stable is still 1.55 and other newer builds having problems are not yet stable and unofficial for the exact reason. They will be improved and quickened up quite a bit before official release build according to him ;)

As for something which creates heat and computers Pi, check SuperPrime developed by a fella on here. The best CPU/RAM test I've played with since Linpack, beats Linpack 32b for stress and heat and shows up errors very quickly. Cheat-preventative, picks up system details through CPUZ too [which was a problem for long], better than wPrime does. One major downside to it is, it only runs on Intel platforms. :(

I have no idea why Charles hasn't updated and made Super Pi more efficient, I know many fellas have complained and advised for it many times over the years. One good reason is, you get to compare from the beginning to the end across all platforms - single threaded, single channel performance. Why Charles doesn't release the source code is one major reason you should be careful with it too -> to limit the cheating.

No calculation that isn't a specific memory test out there yet that I've come across is RAM intensive or much sensitive until you get into the high memory footprint periods of code. Something like SysTool Pi is more RAM intensive than most apps around. PhotoWorxx in EVEREST and WinRAR is about the best I've seen that are quite RAM/FSB intensive, much more than others anyway. A very good memory subsystem benchmark is STREAM, all professionals incl. hardware firms use it and yeah, they tend to compete in it :p: Maybe you can take pointers from that since IIRC it is coded in C as well as Fortran, the source code is available and STREAM2 is being developed currently.

As for Intel/AMD, you should ignore zealot and bias individuals or those with little understanding of uarch functioning and neutralize your benchmark to be platform independent and still remain consistent across processor generations and core improvements - i.e. it can't be showing Pentium 4 faster per MHz than Penryn in integer calcs for instance. Check out Intel documentation on ILP, TLP, PLP at their website, their software developer community covers quite a lot of information and hints. Check out Linpack source code for good pointers too, I know this is how many other devs start off building good benchmarks. ;)
That's what SPEC did when developing the CPU 2006 benchmark and hence why all professional firms compete and rely in it, since they govern the benchmarking affair officially. Both CPU MFG firms have different strengths, weaknesses and dependencies as all data analyzers and coders will know. If you use code optimized running instructions which favor AMD, it will win and if you use the opposite the Intel will win. You can see the instruction and bench types which favor Intel and AMD in this 2.83G Harpertown and 2.3G Barcelona comparison. If you took Gamess for instance, the AMD CPU would outclass the Intel one. But if you took PovRay for example, the Intel CPU would outclass the AMD one. Different code, different strengths, no one brush fits all :yepp:

There really is a strong need to get some multi-threaded version that is RAM intensive out. All CPU MFGs are now moving to decrease data bottlenecks in their core uarchs in buses and increase cache, inter-core, intra-core and RAM bandwidth massively to enable fast computations with improved energy efficiency. Problem is, if the applications and benchmarks around are not coded to take benefit of them, their new instruction sets, their multi-cores, their memory, cache and bus performances, the end result will be useless to show the system perf. and the application might very well run slower on newer urachs then older ones per clock which were single threaded with little memory bandwidth. Everything is being improved for multithreaded parallelism, coding needs to take in account compilers/languages, their optimizations, operational semantics, functional languages, extensions, higher-order functions, polymorphism, non-determinism and so on that exploit parallelism best. Maybe have a look into lambda calculus too.

As for coding, my coding is v.weak now so I'm reserved in what I say, I have no interest in it nor the time. I quit in late 2005 and have not touched it since then apart from Firefox/Thunderbird related coding and whatever comes with its debugging.

EDIT: this might help you. QPi is utilizing the most efficient algorithm I've used, although there may well be better implmentations of it close to the actual: http://www.geocities.com/tsrmath/pi/piprogs.html#QPI

---

Thank you very much for all of this information.

Quote:

---

Hmm, you must be mixing up me with someone else, since as far as I know, I haven't sent anyone anything related to ASM benchmarks, as I don't even know ASM well enough.

Why don't you want to use external libraries? The clock() in time.h is AWFULLY inaccurate(Running time for my plasmas were over 14 seconds, whereas it should have stopped right after 10 seconds were passed.) under heavy CPU load, thus there is no accurate way of measuring time.

---

I have found a way to get the value returned by the high-precision timer of the processor.

Code:

---

void benchmark() {
        const unsigned int calculations = 4294967295; //The maximum amount an integer can hold, and the amount we will add up to
        unsigned int a, b, c, d;
        LARGE_INTEGER start, end, ticks;

        a = b = c = d = 0;

        QueryPerformanceFrequency(&ticks);
        QueryPerformanceCounter(&start);

        __asm {
                mov edi, calculations

                mov eax, a
                mov ebx, b
                mov ecx, c
                mov edx, d

                $loop:
                        add eax, 1
                        add ebx, 1
                        add ecx, 1
                        add edx, 1

                        dec edi
                        jnz $loop
        }

        QueryPerformanceCounter(&end);

        printf("%0.9f seconds\n", (float)(end.QuadPart - start.QuadPart) / ticks.QuadPart);
}

---

I also apologize, spycpu had sent me all of the information.
He provided me with a benchmark that does SSE, SSE2, and 3DNow! operations, and returns results in MIPS (Millions of instructions per second)

Np :)
Have a look at this, coding properly for multi-core, multi-processor systems is not easy: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=q...l=en#PPA198,M1
Maybe a bit simpler on loop transformations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_optimization

This is basics, I expect you've already looked at it but if you haven't it may help: http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/a...s/eng/2589.htm

And this is what MC/MP specialists say: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Art...ng-experts.htm

Quote:

---

Last week, Chris Rowen, CEO of multi-processor specialist Tensilica, said: "The challenge of writing software for programming general purpose computing applications is generally recognised in the scientific computing community as the biggest single unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable, computing problem."

Will Intel and AMD ever get there? "They'll suddenly realise where they've been going wrong and take the right approach and then they'll say they invented it", replied Robertson, "I suspect Intel are doing it already, they're just too embarrassed to admit it."

---

http://www.benchmarkhq.ru/english.html?/be_cpu.html

MaxPI is a multithreaded PI calculator, using a different algorithm altogether. It is very interesting to run this on a Phenom (9600 BE, B2) ... core 2 is always slower (by almost 10%)


Jack

Been following, thought I would subscribe.

Good luck MuffinFlavored, hope it goes well... No request's here, dont know much about it, would like a nice GUI though :P

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Qkjhfhaiguihfma

look here, too.

http://gmplib.org/pi-with-gmp.html

---

Hi guys,

i was following your discussion and when the above link was posted i wanted to test this pi algorithm. Unfortunately there was only the source code available and it took me one day to figure out how to compile it. And finally i did it :)

I thought it might be interesting for other people to run it and compare the results between each other and the website. Since i have almost no expirience with gcc i hope the executables run on your system.....
Those were created on AMD64-64Bit SuseLinux. The source uses GMP libraries from http://gmplib.org/.
This means they dont run on 32Bit linux i think.
Further i have created different optimized versions. One standard(should run on all processors) one for K8 and one for K10.
But keep in mind since the source uses GMP the optimisations wont effect the program on a large scale i think.

AFTER DOWNLOAD RENAME THE EXTENSION FROM .TXT TO .out for example.

I would be interested if someone can run this on a phenom and compare the K8 to the K10 version.

To execute the files you have to do the following:
1. copy the files somewhere on your HDD in a folder.
2. open a shell(console)
3. go into that folder using cd myfolder or something
4. Enter: ./programm name.out .Make sure there is no space between ./ and the program name. E.g. ./pi-normal-opt.out 10000000 <PRESS ENTER>. The 10000000 specifies that you want to calculate pi up to 10 million digits.

I have no idea if those run on your machines.... but i hope so.

This is what i have gotten @ 3400MHz:
moork@linux-nns4:~/programming> ./pi-normal-opt.out 10000000
#terms=705136, depth=21
sieve time = 0.170
.................................................. .

bs time = 15.360
gcd time = 2.760
div time = 1.840
sqrt time = 0.990
mul time = 0.700
total time = 19.070
P size=14561191 digits (1.456119)
Q size=14561184 digits (1.456118)



And using

Well GMP runs in 32-bit as well. Will try it out. Anyone got any good optimization flags for K8 to suggest? Havent played arond with optimizing for perfomance with gcc.
//Edit if you mean that you compiled the files on a 64bit OS then yes they wont work on 32bit OSes

Yes, i have compiled them under 64Bit Linux.

Here is the link with the CPU specific compilerflags
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4....002d64-Options

e.g. gcc -mtune=K8 etc

Hmmm SP on linux without Wine.
I thought about it for a long time ago.
I've of course tried but it was only a big loss lol.
Get on your great work mate ;)

This proggy beats SuperPI tenfold....

And by the way it is faster on AMD than the Intels and this is the real interesting part :) The speed info can be found on the GMP website.
Of course it has no real interface thats the bad part.