Dhrystone and Whetstone...what do they mean????

[sweeper2]

Dhrystone and Whetstone...what exactly do they mean..and why does my amd drop signifignly on the whetstone with only (1) number compared to a pentium which usually stays about equal on benchmarks with (2) numbers??

any info would be appreciated...thanks

athlon xp 2500 @ 11X200= athlon xp 3200
Dhrystone=8425
whetstone=3475

compared pentium processor :
Intel Pentium 4-B 2.8 GHZ 512L2 (win32X86)
Dhrystone=8625
Whetstone=3554/6246

[wju425]

Best I can explain it.

Dhrystone - number of instructions per second.

Whetstone - number of floating point units per second.

\o/ Billy

[sweeper2]

Originally posted by wju425
Best I can explain it.

Dhrystone - number of instructions per second.

Whetstone - number of floating point units per second.

\o/ Billy

what the heck are floating points..? will have to look into this more....

[nukes]

I think Dhrystone is stressing the ALU (integer calculations)
Whetstone is the FPU (math co-processor, since the pentium they've been on the same chip though)
Floating point arithmatic is when you need to specify a number out of the normal range of the CPU. Sort of like Standard form in maths. (i.e. 6.02*10^23) It is stored in two parts. The mantissa, which stores the actual number, and the exponent that stores the position of the binary point.
For some more detailed information, I suggest you examine IEEE754:
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/754/
That link will provide you with the basic resources.