[powerglide]

What you do is download the following from the super computing center:

ftp://pi.super-computing.org/windows/super_pi.zip

Close all other applications, then run it.

It calculates Pi to as many digits you want.

Most modern desktops could do about 2 million digits (2M) in about 1-1.5 minutes. Modern laptops should be around 1.5-2.5 minutes from results I have seen.


I'll go first:

Dell Inspiron 7500
256 MB of RAM
Pentium 3

It took 8:39 to compute 2M digits of Pi.


Its a 5 year old laptop thats holding on with a thread.

 

[Krashed989]

for 2m of pi, it took 2 mins and 57 seconds.

It's a dell inspiron 5150
1gig of ram
pentium 4 processor

I know I may have viruses and/or spyware though because it's going kinda slow today.

 

[danbuc]

4 min. 14 sec. to calculate out to 4 million.

My own creation-

1gb Ram
3.0 Ghz Pentium 4

I still had about 8 programs running in the backround that weren't currently being used, so it wasn't running at it's peak. I didn't feel like closing every single application, so I'll stick with this time for 4 million. Everyone seems to be trying 2 million, so maybe I'll give that a shot as well.

edit: 1 min. 56 sec. to calculate out to 2 million.

 

[powerglide]

Yeah, I'm not sure what applications are running in the background......the taskmanager is listing all kinds of things.
All I did was close obviously open applications like the web browser and such.

 

[[email protected]]

3m:46s to calculate 2.1 million (it's a command line program on the Mac and I'm not sure how to set it properly).

2x 867MHz G4 Powermac

Not bad for a machine that's over 3 years old.



1m:31s to calculate 2.1 million

1x 2.0GHz G5 iMac

Did that over a VNC connection so it didn't quite have the machines full attention.

 

[powerglide]

Wow Macs are pretty quick! (then again you have some pretty nice high end machines there......lots of RAM?)

 

[90Brougham350]

I'm gonna guess about a minute 30, 1:40 maybe. I run linux. My hardware includes a gig of DDR 400 memory, and a 15% overclocked 2.7 AMD. Think I'm close?

 

[fast66]

my laptop says 1:35 for 2M digits

its a toshiba m60 2.26ghz

3:49 4M

 

[thu]

1:59 - 2 million digits
4:17 - 4 million digits

My own creation:
1.8 Ghz AMD Sempron (64-bit, but running 32-bit Windows 2000) - otherwise known as "AMD 3000+ Sempron"
1 GByte RAM PC3200 (DDR 400)
ABIT NF8-V AMD S754 Motherboard

63 processes running in the background.

 

[powerglide]

I'm gonna guess about a minute 30, 1:40 maybe. I run linux. My hardware includes a gig of DDR 400 memory, and a 15% overclocked 2.7 AMD. Think I'm close?

Dunno....give it a try!

 

[powerglide]

One of my desktops at work got 2m02s for 2M digits

Its a Pentium 4
3GHz
2GigsRam

Slower than I thought...

Just tried one of my network servers

2m20s
Dual Intel Xeo 3.2 GHz
3+gigs of ram

I kinda knew my desptop would be faster than the servers but these are both pretty damned slow!
(I guess theres too much crap running in the background)

 

[Vesicant]

2M - 1 minute 49 seconds

AMD 64 3000+ (2.01 ghz)

1.5gig ram

I got the average! :highfive:

 

[[email protected]]

I was surprised with the figures from the G5 machine, which is 2GHz and given the fact that most of the 3GHz P4s are reporting much slower times.

Most Powermacs nowadays are dual processor, in fact the one I have my eye on to replace mine is a dual core, dual processor machine, so that's 4 cores.
I suspect that would do it in 40-50 seconds at most.
My single processor iMac is about average for a Mac these days.

My Powermac G4 is pretty slow. It's 3 years old and was the slowest one (of the three) available at the time. No matter, it's fine in day to day work.


Both machines ar erunning 2GB of RAM, but the process monitor suggests the application is only using 5MB of RAM anyway.

 

[thu]

I kinda knew my desptop would be faster than the servers but these are both pretty damned slow!
(I guess theres too much crap running in the background)

That is par for the P4s. I find that when AMD says that their 3000+ processors perform about the same as the P4 3.0 Ghz, they're right on.

the AMD 3000+ Semprons actually run at 1.8 Ghz.

Intel has never been known for floating point performance.

I have a P4 3.2 Ghz Hyperthreaded with PC3200 RAM and it is a little faster than my AMD 3000+ running at 1.8 Ghz. However, for multi-threaded apps, the Intel HT CPU comes out way ahead. The problem is that the Intel P4 chips consume *tons* of power.

Unless one of your background processes is consuming lots of CPU (see the Task Manager for this info), the background tasks won't factor into this benchmark.

 

[thu]

I was surprised with the figures from the G5 machine, which is 2GHz and given the fact that most of the 3GHz P4s are reporting much slower times..

Motorola Processors (in this case, Motorola/IBM) have always had much better Floating Point Units than Intel ever had. This dates waaay back to the days of the 68020/68881/68882.

Most Powermacs nowadays are dual processor, in fact the one I have my eye on to replace mine is a dual core, dual processor machine, so that's 4 cores.

I suspect that would do it in 40-50 seconds at most.

This 'pi' benchmark is most likely single-threaded, so adding more cores won't make a bit of difference. However, if you have other tasks that are consuming significant CPU resources, then adding more cores will help as the OS will have more CPU resources on which to schedule tasks. Otherwise, I think you'll be disappointed when trying to run your quad-core machine on the PI benchmark.

On edit:

HOWEVER, the above discussion assumes that this PI benchmark uses floating point numbers. I now think that it uses intermediate integer calculations and no floating point math as FP may be too imprecise and roundoff errors occur too early in the algorithms.

So...that means the PI benchmarks shows that AMD and PowerPC CPUs are faster than the Intel P4 for even the Integer math - as far as this little benchmark is concerned. This is a little surprising because Intel was always very good at Integer operations.

I'd like to get my hands on the source code and see for myself.

 

[[email protected]]

It would be interesting to know.

I thought the figure for the dual G4 Powermac was a bit slow to be honest and I did wonder if it used both processors.
But a glance at the graphs on my process monitor suggests that it does as activity on both climbs high while the program is running.


I expected a 2.0GHz G5 to be about the same as a 3.0GHz P4 but it seems faster.

Another reason I wish Apple hadn't decided to switch to Intel processors.
I must try and save up for the best of the last of the G5s... (which I suspect will be the last machines to go Intel)

 

[thu]

Yes, I'd like to see the source code to see if the authors installed some multi-threading tweaks into it.

Yes, too bad Apple is switching to Intel CPUs, but IBM and Motorola could not provide the power savings of the Intel M line. Also, in this cut-throat business, they need whatever economies of scale they can get.

 

[Elvis]

2:31 for 2 million.

P-4, 376MB Ram. 2.53 ghz.

 

[Vesicant]

AMD and Apple Computer FTW! :highfive:

I dont see how my 64 beat every single P4- even a dual processor server, but that was probably doing its job of serving which eats up resources.

 

[powerglide]

Thats it I just ordered a new computer!
(well I've been thinking about it for a while anyways....)

I needed it right now, and needed to be uber cheap.
So I ended up ordering a Compaq V2000 laptop with the base Celeron M chip.
60 gig 5400 rpm hard drive. Bluetooth enabled. Brite view, widescreen monitor.
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_series.do?series_name=V2000_series&catLevel=2&category=notebooks/compaq_presario&storeName=computer_store

I know its not gonna be blazing quick but all I need this one for is simple word processing/powerpoint/play some dvds and music/maybe look at some pictures/web browsing. So I think it'll be fine.

I ordered it with only 256 RAM but I am gonna order an aditional 512 or maybe a gig later.