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Alan, My first though on this problem is that
your Dell could easily be a Pentium-III, and the Compaq is probably a Pentium 4.
The P4 is widely noted for having a very long pipeline (some 24 stages if memory
serves) while the P3 is under half that. Commstime is a benchmark with an
extraordinarily large number of jumps in it; almost none of the code is inline.
Therefore, it makes sense that the P4 will have a harder time of it than the
P3. You’re right to worry about the
memory bandwidth; the pipeline misses will cost much more if the code is
missing L1 cache much. I too have found that xterm is
consistently the fastest terminal around, beating even a plain console in some
cases. Hope this helps,
I was recently comparing
commstime values for my python implementation of CSP-style primitives and kroc
and came away with some surprising (to me anyway :o) results. I tried the
commstime metrics on two different machines, a 2.4 GHz Compaq laptop and a 1.0
GHz Dell. |