FPU usage & benchmarks

[Michael H.W. Weber]

Hi guys,
I have the suspicion that DF - in contrast to for example Folding@home - makes no great use of the FPU. Is this correct? I conclude this from the fact that some people in our forum have reported only minor differences between AMD (pure FPU power :D ) and Intel CPUs at comparable CPU frequencies. It appears as if DF simply scales with CPU speed. I would be interested in some comments on this. I could not measure it myself because I have already kicked all Intel boxes out. :jester:

Fold on, :cheers:
Michael.

[Brian the Fist]

The algorithm spends the majority of its time doing pointer traversal (following pointers down a tree-like structure). IT is fastest on Alpha CPUs which seem to perform this sort of operation best but you are correct, it basically depends most on raw CPU power.