Quoting Poul-Henning Kamp <phk_at_phk.freebsd.dk>: > In message <1942228052.20040302193211_at_andric.com>, Dimitry Andric writes: > >>> I would prefer to have a program called "stress" which could be run >>> at any time to test hardware. >> >> It's called "make buildworld". ;) > > In fact it isn't (anymore). > > I've seen modern hardware run buildworld for days, but explode on > scientific FP work in a few minutes. > > It used to be the case that buildworld would stress a CPU, but with > all the specialty circuitry put into CPUs these days, buildworld > probably ends up using the MMX and SSE extension silicon as a > heatsink. > > A real stress-test would be something which engages bus-interface, > integer, floating point and preferably any "extensions" as well. One decent benchmark for me has been encoding from mpeg2 to mpeg4 using mencoder. If you run one process using MMX/SSE/whatever and the other forced to normal FP, you can test all the different execution units at once doing this. I've had times where I had my memory timings set too agressively in BIOS, where make buildworld wouldn't cause any problems, but using a couple of mencoders at once along with a buildworld would make the machine die. :-) KenReceived on Tue Mar 02 2004 - 10:22:46 UTC
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