Monday, October 11, 2010

Difference due to operating system

I have a PC in our workshop area that needs to run Windows 2000 to remain compatible with some older production equipment. I noticed that the OS doesn't even support SSE2 and hence this machine can't run any AQUA work units. I set up a dual boot with the current Ubuntu 64-bit desktop as the second OS. I am surprised at the difference in speeds this has highlighted for a single-core Celeron chip:

Windows 2000:
Measured floating point speed:    1512.17 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed:    2385.3 million ops/sec

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS:
Measured floating point speed    1309.06 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed    5868.99 million ops/sec

I will run a couple of CUDA work-units at some stage (probably Collatz as they appear to be fairly consistent) and see how the 8600GT GPU differs due to OS.

Edit: Under Ubuntu, on average Collatz CUDA work-units are 36% SLOWER than under Windows

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