
Building The Linux Kernel In 60 Seconds - llambda
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAyNjU
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ChuckMcM
tl;dr version - Intel's latest chip is pretty fast.

Having 'grown up' around computers I have found that this sort of 'damn!'
moment is not uncommon. At some point in a person's experience there is
something they do with computers a lot and its 'hard' for the computer to do
(aka slow) and then suddenly one day its 'easy.' It calls attention to the
growth that is the industry. My particular moment was a 1 GB disk drive, at
USC that was how much space was hooked up to all three DEC-10 machines (330MB
per) and it took up a room.

That being said, the new Sandy bridge is a beast of a machine. One can wonder
if it is near the peak of what you might use as a desktop in the post-PC era.
Sort of like the muscle cars in the 70's which were replaced in the 80's and
90's with cars that went for different targets (mileage, handling, etc).

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tommi
"use as a desktop in the post-PC era". Isn't a desktop computer pretty much a
definition of a PC?

I doubt that this is the peak. With muscle cars, there was no need for more
muscle. With desktop computers you can easily see use cases for more "muscle"
and that need will keep the growth going on.

~~~
ChuckMcM
It would be interesting for you to say more about 'easily see use cases for
more "muscle"'. I was under the impression that one of the challenges that PC
vendors were facing is that laptops and PCs are 'good enough' for more and
more of the computer marketplace and so they were unable to depend on
'upgrade' revenue as the components got more capable.

I don't doubt that there are folks that can use infinite amounts of computer
power, but if they become so specialized perhaps it will shift the market
around again.

~~~
tommi
One common scenario are the browsers. Imagine websites with real 3D model e.g.
nike.com with a modeled shoe. Browsers are becoming an application platform
and to deliver rich client style UI, it takes juice.

Video editing is becoming more and more common place with cheap digital video
cameras and the ones on camera phones.

I agree that the upgrade cycle may become longer, but to me it seems like
there is a market for more CPU power on the desktops. I think there is some
normal fluctuation where you improve one or more corners of the industry at a
time.

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beagle3
I know this is not what the article talks about, but ... Bellard did this in
15 seconds, in 2004 with a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4. In the 7 years since, I except a
4-fold increase in speed, so on modern hardware it will probably be 4 seconds,
maybe 1 or 2 on the beast described in this article.

~~~
jronkone
> Bellard did this in 15 seconds, in 2004 with a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4

But isn't Linux kernel a lot bigger nowadays?

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xyzzyz
He did it with his own C compiler (tcc).

~~~
ars
See:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_C_Compiler#Compiled_progra...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_C_Compiler#Compiled_program_performance)

There are tradeoffs for compiling very fast: Slower program execution.

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eliben
Ah, compiling C is so pleasantly fast.

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ypcx
Wondering how fast it could build Android 4.0.
(<http://source.android.com/source/building.html>) Bit of a pun intended. I
have recently realized that a 4-core smarthpone, one of those coming in
mid-2012, on a 1.5 GHz (e.g. the rumored HTC Edge) theoretically packs similar
power to that of my dual-core Macbook Pro 2.8 GHz (4x1.5=6 vs. 2.8x2=5.6). One
probably cannot compare OMAP with x86 too much, but still, the CPU
developments in mobile space excite me more than the desktop ones, which
frankly, disappoint me a bit. Somehow, sometime in 2000s I expected to have
massively parallel CPU sometime around now, not a mere 6-core.

~~~
piinbinary
A desktop CPU probably has about an order of magnitude more power per cycle
than a mobile chip.

They have bigger caches (less time spent waiting for memory), more logic
units, deeper pipelines, and can handle far more 'in-flight' instructions.

That said, the smart phones of today probably do have more power than desktop
computers of about 10 years ago.

edit: now that I think about it, a order of magnitude is probably generous,
but I would still guess that it's at least a factor > 2.

~~~
ypcx
I don't have time to get better data, i.e. I couldn't find any MFLOPS data for
a mobile CPU (not GPU), so just quickly unscientifically:

Texas Instruments OMAP4460 (in Galaxy Nexus at 1,2 GHz): 2047.7 BogoMIPS

1.7 GHz Xeon from 2006 (the small EC2 instance, single-core): 5203.55 BogoMIPS

Would be interesting to see some real benchmarks though..

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justincormack
You dont want flops figures - no floating point is used to compile.

Bogomips lives up to its name.

I suspect that compiling has fairly poor locality and is quite cache
dependent, so you might be better off just benchmarking on a mobile cpu.

~~~
xal
Not a great test either but better then the above:

    
    
      Geekbench 2 on iPhone 4S: 617
      Geekbench 2 32bit on iMac i7 @ 2.80GHz: 8557

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pook1e
Honest question, because I'm actually curious about this. Are these extreme
edition chips used almost exclusively by enthusiasts, or are they actually
used in certain software engineering branches?

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miahi
Most enthusiasts don't buy top of the line. It's way cheaper to buy the
"second best" and overclock your way to the Extreme Edition's performance
(which is really easy with the new chips).

The second best in this case is i7-3930K, same 6 cores and architecture (just
100MHz difference) but with less cache (12MB vs 15MB) at half the price.

~~~
pook1e
Thanks for the response. That makes sense, obviously you can pay a lot less
and get more by overclocking the CPU. Then my question is, who actually buys
these chips, and for what purpose?

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eliben
Well, isn't this basic differential pricing? If there are customers who are
willing to "pay as much as needed" for "the fastest chip they have", why
wouldn't Intel offer it? It shouldn't be too expensive to "brand" yet another
model, and there are enough enthusiasts to shell the required cash on this
thing. $1K isn't that much, really.

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brooksbp
the ads on phoronix are getting pretty over-the-top

