> ... > So four cores? But only one core is running under DOS (albeit at max > clock speed). > ...
Several somewhat interesting factoids (specific CPU instructions, levels and sizes of caches, USB speed, pipelining, ips, etc.) but mostly irrelevant to the discussion at hand. > So what instructions are you testing? You can download the source code for SLOWDOWN if you want. But the basic routine that is being tested essentially performs every CPU instruction available on an 8086/8088 CPU. Nothing that requires a 286+ CPU is performed (at least not in that part of the program). SLOWDOWN is compatible with even an 8088, though you normally wouldn't want to slow down an 8088 CPU any more than it already is. > ... > I suspect you may not believe my results, but they are nonetheless > real. > > Sometimes regressions happen. It's a tradeoff. This is something much more serious than a "tradeoff" or a "regression". My new i5 CPU appears to be spending _at least_ 99% of its resources NOT processing OpCodes and NOT accessing the cache (because there isn't one). And the problem is blamed on "sub-optimal code". I don't know what the CPU is doing with all those resources it has, but I do know what it's NOT doing. I do know that what's going on inside a CPU is very complicated. Call me naive, but I always thought the primary purpose of a CPU was to process OpCodes. Silly me. > ... > AMD's Ryzen just turned six years old last week... I just read an article on Ryzen CPU's the other day that talked about the reason they were "better" than an Intel was because of something called a 3D cache. I'm not sure if the 3D cache is a different cache hardware architecture or a different relationship between the different caching "levels" or a different caching algorithm or some combination (or something else than any of those), but for the discussion here it is still a "cache trick" that has nothing to do with actual CPU speed. The same article said that the 3D cache makes certain applications slower, so to really take full advantage the software must be "optimized" to meet the special characteristics of that specific cache. > IA-32 is dead. Nobody wants it anymore. Maybe they're only > optimizing cpus for 64-bit... If nobody wants it anymore then why do Virtual Machines that emulate IA-32 (and even lesser CPUs like 8088) even exist? They said DOS was dead a LONG time ago and yet here we are on a FreeDOS forum. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
