Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Factor performance shootout

I ran a number of Factor benchmarks on the following machines:
  • 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, running Debian Linux, proprietary NVidia driver
  • 2.4 GHz Athlon 64 (dual processor), running Ubuntu Linux, proprietary NVidia driver
  • Apple MacBook Pro - 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo (dual processor) running Mac OS X
  • Apple PowerMac - 2.5 GHz G5 (quad processor) running Mac OS X

The benchmarks were:
  • Stage 2 bootstrap - this involves compiling all words, building the online help search index, and loading the UI backend.
  • Fibonacci - this tests procedure activation overhead and integer math.
  • Mandelbrot - this tests complex number arithmetic.
  • Raytracer - this tests floating point arithmetic.
  • Evaluating [ tests compiler-tests ] time in the UI listener - the unit tests themselves include a lot of performance-intensive code, and this also measures how fast the UI can relayout and redraw, since the tests generate a lot of output.

The results were interesting. The best result in each row is shown in italics.
Pentium 4AMD64MacBook ProPowerMac G5
Bootstrap (mins:secs)4:564:404:386:19
Fibonacci (ms)360320470830
Mandelbrot (secs)3.32.82.45.4
Raytracer (secs)18211842
Unit tests (secs)24222038

The results indicate there is a lot more work to do on the PowerPC compiler backend. The Core Duo's good performance is rather surprising.

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