Memory bandwidth, was Adaptac 2940

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From
Russell L. Carter <rcarter@geli.com>
Date
18 May 1995 09:47:47
Subject
Memory bandwidth, was Adaptac 2940
Message-ID
199505181646.JAA05785@geli.clusternet


[ Hide this part ]
|From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@ref.tfs.com>
|Subject: Re: Adaptec 2940?

|> > The drivers are identical, so the interupt time should be the same for
|> > driving either card on the same machine. Your benchmark is not really
|> > valid since they were run on different motherboards.
|>
|> To some extent. It is instesting that a good EISA system can best a
|> poor PCI system. Woe to those buying cheap PCI motherboards.
|
|Oh, it's much worse than that. This is some numbers I have been collecting,
|the represent the bandwidth between CPU and RAM pretty well:
|


|A RS6000/590, AIX 3.2.5
| # cc -o ram-speed -O3 ram-speed.c
| # ./ram-speed
| 49005fb0 0.116 uS/op 8.61e+06 op/S 32.833 Mb/S
| 8938c0df 0.177 uS/op 5.64e+06 op/S 21.532 Mb/S
|

I don't know what to make of this. The 590 is capable of 4*8=32 bytes
transferred from main memory per 62.5 MHZ clock. A simple matrix-matrix
multiply will attain this. That's a hellava lot more than 32 MB/s.
This system has had the best memory bandwidth of any non Cray Research
system for the past year.

There is a something like a "-power2" optimization switch that makes a
lot of difference.

Another memory benchmark that has been run on a lot of systems is STREAM,
available from ftp://perelandra.cms.udel.edu/bench/stream. Results
are in

ftp://perelandra.cms.udel.edu/bench/stream/Tables/table.print

My P5-100-TP4-PB/FreeBSD system is in there, looks pretty good against lower
end SGIs and SUNs, but doesn't come close to the RS6000/590.

Russell


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