Mail Archives: djgpp/1994/12/25/09:21:21
A couple of days ago I published some balderdash concerning the
performance loss due to notebooks w/o FPU. My algorithm (subtracting
earliest object time from executable time) simply was invalid as *all*
the builds were interrupted at least once (before the link).
It turns out that my office system (AMI EISA 486DX/50MHz, 16MB
RAM, 4MB hardware disk cache) gives quite good performance, building
Ghostscript in well under 10 minutes for a rate of about 400
lines/sec. (Don't forget that this is a multi-tasked environment,
with DESQview/X.) The notebook in question (IBM ThinkPad 330cs,
486SLC2/50MHz, 12MB RAM, 1MB software cache) still did terribly,
taking 2.5--3.1 hours, for a rate of 15--20 lines/sec.
I still don't understand why the performance is so bad, but I
don't attribute it to the lack of fp processor. One possibility is
that there was actually only 4MB RAM in the machine at the time (it
took a while for the upgrade to arrive). I think IBM just made a bad
machine.
Details are available if you're interested, but I don't think
they're of great interest to the list in general.
--Steve
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