> > I don't know about Linux, but it has been noted before prime95
> > iteration times can vary a few percent from day to day.
>
> Indeed. I've come to the conclusion that what I'm seeing is clock
> oscillator drift. This could explain what I've seen, if the CPU
> wasn't warm enough to begin with. And it's consistent with the
> above reports - assuming there are no background activity going on.
IMHO, unlikely. The CPU clock is the same clock being used to measure the
time via the pentium's RDTSC instruction. Speed up or slow down the CPU
clock, it would still take the same number of clocks.
Far more likely is minor variations in page table hits and cache misses due
to distribution of the prime95 pages in ram.
-jrp
