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OS/2 Shareware BBS: 8 Other
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Read.Me
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1997-02-09
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DDDDDD FFFFFFF BBBBB
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Data Flow Benchmark V 1.8c
(c) 1994,1995,1996,1997 by D.Engert
1. Legal stuff
There is no warranty. Use this software on your own risk. Due to the complexity
and variety of today's hardware and software which may be used to run this
program, I am not responsible for any damage or loss of data caused by use of
this software. It was tested very well and is expected to work correctly, but
nobody can actually guarantee this for any circumstances. And because this
software is free, you get what you pay for ...
This program can be used freely for private or educational purposes. If you want
to use it for commercial purposes or find any bugs or have suggestions about
further enhancement, please contact the author.
DFB may be distributed freely. The current original DFB distribution archive
only contains material, of which I am the exclusive owner of all rights (older
archives contained SSMDD.SYS just to ease using DFB, but it's copyrighted by
IBM and you should have it anyway).
In the last months, DFB appeared on several CD-ROMs. I don't mind this, if
these CD-ROMS are made in the spirit of the freeware/shareware concept. I don't
grant anybody the rights to raise money from DFB, so CD-ROMs or any other media
containing DFB must be sold at a reasonable low prize to the end user, or DFB
must be left out.
Author: D. Engert
Gruentenweg 14
D-90471 Nuernberg
Germany
Fax: +49-911-861319
EMail: 2:2490/2576.1@fidonet
dengert@medav.de
2. Purpose and intent of this program
Todays hardware gets more and more powerful but more complicated too. Modern
motherboards using up to date chip sets may turn out to be very difficult to
configure. And to make things worse, there are different manufacturers of CPU
chips besides Intel now with new features and options. The memory subsystems
implemented on these motherboards are even harder to configure, taking into
consideration different cache strategies, RAM speeds and access modes.
Beyond the core of any computer system lay the peripherals (video, magnetic
storage..) connected by a variety of bus implementations like ISA, EISA, VLB or
PCI. Chip sets used on these peripherals are often of even higher complexity
than the computer core.
Even skilled users are often overwhelmed by the sheer complexity and variety
of options offered. Nobody will them the real power available to them by a
given computer system using a particular configuration set. How should a user
optimize his or her computer or how should a buyer choose between similar
looking components based on hard facts ? May be this program will help you !
3. What will this program offer ?
Let's have a look on the output (framed) of the current version run on my own
machine.
Machine configuration:
ASUS P55TP4XE motherboard
Intel P54C-100 CPU,
Intel 'Triton' PCI/ISA chip set,
256 KByte synchronous pipelined burst cache RAM, 32 MByte of 60ns DRAM,
Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM video board, 2 MByte VRAM
All BIOS configuration settings are optimized for maximum throughput. That
gives the following results:
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Data flow benchmark v1.8 |
| |
| copyright (c) 1994-1996 D.Engert |
| |
| Processor : Intel Pentium P54 (Fam:5 Mod:2 Rev:5) |
| Clock : 99.6 MHz |
| virtual Interrupts : present |
| Coprocessor : present |
| Internal bus width : 32 bit between processor and primary cache |
| External bus width : 32 bit between primary and secondary cache |
| DRAM page size : 4 KByte |
| MMU cache : 64 entries 2-way set associative, 4KByte per entry |
| Primary cache : 8 KByte 2-way set associative |
| Secondary cache : 256 KByte direct mapped |
| Cache line size : 16 Bytes |
| Cache strategy : write back, no dirty tag, dirty extra waits: 0.0 clocks|
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
These figures are quite selfexplanatory. Type and speed of the CPU are detected,
the width of the data paths between CPU core and primary cache - typically
located on the same chip as the CPU core - and between the core or primary
cache and the secondary cache (if present) or main memory.
The program next tries to determine the effective page size, if page mode is
implemented by the chip set. The following 3 lines show information about the
address translation lookaside buffer (MMU cache), the primary and secondary
cache. Size and associativity are checked, the length of a cache line is
determined and the strategy used by the cache subsystem (write-through or write-
back) is sensed.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Data flow and bus performance memory |
| |
| -- Memory -> CPU --------- |
| Maximum 8K FETCH (Hits) : 7.6µs ( 756c) ->1071.2MB/s ( 0.09c/Byte) |
| 8K FETCH (Miss+Hit) : 27.6µs ( 2749c) -> 294.8MB/s ( 0.34c/Byte) |
| Minimum 8K FETCH (Misses) : 54.9µs ( 5470c) -> 148.1MB/s ( 0.67c/Byte) |
| Maximum 4K LODSD (Hits) : 30.9µs ( 3080c) -> 132.5MB/s ( 0.75c/Byte) |
| 4K LODSD (Miss+Hit) : 43.9µs ( 4371c) -> 93.3MB/s ( 1.07c/Byte) |
| Minimum 4K LODSD (Misses) : 67.7µs ( 6741c) -> 60.5MB/s ( 1.65c/Byte) |
| -- CPU -> Memory --------- |
| Maximum 4K STOSD (Hits) : 10.8µs ( 1079c) -> 378.2MB/s ( 0.26c/Byte) |
| Minimum 4K STOSD (Misses) : 45.8µs ( 4561c) -> 89.4MB/s ( 1.11c/Byte) |
| -- Memory -> Memory ------ |
| Maximum 4K MOVSD (Hits) : 10.6µs ( 1051c) -> 388.0MB/s ( 0.26c/Byte) |
| 4K MOVSD (Miss+Hit) : 63.3µs ( 6301c) -> 64.7MB/s ( 1.54c/Byte) |
| 4K MOVSD (Clean) : 86.5µs ( 8616c) -> 47.3MB/s ( 2.10c/Byte) |
| Minimum 4K MOVSD (Misses) : 112.2µs ( 11178c) -> 36.5MB/s ( 2.73c/Byte) |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
These are the performance figures of the CPU <--> memory data path.
There are four disciplines:
- opcode fetch
- data load
- data store
- data move.
Depending on the discipline several scenarios are tested (denoted in paren-
theses):
- hits in all memory caches (hits)
- hit in secondary cache, but not in primary (miss+hit)
- hit with replace in clean secondary cache, no write back necessary (clean)
- hit with replace in dirty secondary cache, write back carried out (dirty)
- misses in all caches (misses)
The first (hits) should give maximum performance down to the last (misses) with
minimum speed.
The test transfer size depends on the cache and page sizes. In the case above
it is 4 or 8KByte.
There are four result columns:
- absolute time needed for one test of the mentioned size
- the same in CPU clock cycles
- the resulting transfer speed in MBytes per second
- the cost of the operation in cycles per Byte
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| VIO info : SVGA, 2 MByte video memory |
| Device info : manufacturer S3, chip set 86C968, 2 MByte video memory |
| Screen : 1280x1024x256 |
| Aperture : 2 MByte @ 0x88000000 |
| Bus width : 32 bit between CPU and video memory |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The information about the video system is queried from different parts of OS/2,
so there may be different figures for the same item. That depends more or less
on how careful the developer of the video drivers did the job...
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Data flow and bus performance video |
| |
| -- Video -> CPU ---------- |
| 4K LODSD : 567.1µs ( 56476T) -> 7.2MB/s (13.79T/Byte) |
| -- CPU -> Video ---------- |
| 4K STOSD : 48.4µs ( 4823T) -> 84.6MB/s ( 1.18T/Byte) |
| -- Memory -> Video ------- |
| Maximum 4K MOVSD (Hits) : 48.6µs ( 4836T) -> 84.4MB/s ( 1.18T/Byte) |
| 4K MOVSD (Miss+Hit) : 63.3µs ( 6304T) -> 64.7MB/s ( 1.54T/Byte) |
| Minimum 4K MOVSD (Misses) : 86.6µs ( 8625T) -> 47.3MB/s ( 2.11T/Byte) |
| -- Video -> Memory ------- |
| 4K MOVSD : 603.4µs ( 60093T) -> 6.8MB/s (14.67T/Byte) |
| -- Video -> Video -------- |
| 4K MOVSD : 941.9µs ( 93813T) -> 4.3MB/s (22.90T/Byte) |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
This is the same as above, obviously the discipline opcode fetch is left out,
but there are more transfer data paths.
The figures for data store and move from primary cache into video memory are
more or less senseless on local bus systems and coprocessed video cards, but
give at least an idea how careful these buses are implemented.
I don't comment the actual figures, because each - and most probably your -
system is different. Compare yourself, I only say this system is a fast one in
its category...
4. How do I start this program ?
That's easy: go to a command line and type
DFB [options]
The following options are currently implemented:
/NOV[ideo] : suppress video testing
/CC:number : set country code to number, default is from CONFIG.SYS
49 : Germany (deutsch)
43 : Austria (deutsch)
39 : Italy (italiano) [DFBITA.MSG required]
else : international (english)
/MORE : stops output after each section to ease reading
/DMP : dump test values to stderr
may be redirected to file via 'DFB /DMP [...] 2>filename'
Options are not case sensitive !
The commands 'help DFB0000' or 'DFB /?' will give you the same information about
the usage of the latest version of DFB.
If you have configured your desktop according to your favourite language, DFB
uses this setting (OS2.INI/PM_National/iLanguageFam) before looking at the
country code in CONFIG.SYS. This setting is not present until you touch the
language object in the system setup folder!
If you start DFB in a full screen session, video testing will be left out,
since there is no video aperture available. Better use a windowed OS/2 box.
To access memory and video for testing, the device driver SSMDD.SYS must be
loaded. It is part of MMPM/2. Be sure, the statement
DEVICE=[path]\SSMDD.SYS
is in your config.sys file. DFB will tell you if it is not. In this case, only
a small part of the DFB functionality is available (basic CPU type checking).
If you don't have MMPM/2 installed but like to get the full DFB functionality,
you must grab SSMDD.SYS from your OS/2 installation media. OS/2 2.1 user find
this driver in the MMPM subdirectory. OS/2 WARP user first need to create a
subdirectory x:\MMTEMP on any partition and then issue the command
UNPACK [path]\PACK0 /N:SSMDD.SYS ([path] is path to install media).
SSMDD.SYS is then to be found in x:\MMTEMP. Place the driver in any location
you like and insert the DEVICE statement above into your CONFIG.SYS.
If you create a minimum boot disk with floppy support only, there is enough
room left to put SSMDD.SYS and DFB.EXE onto it too. So you may enter your
favourite computer shop and check out the different machines offered by a mere
boot from this floppy disk.
5. Is there danger to use this program ?
Yes, there is !
First, I am human so I am error prone :-)
Second, DFB goes to the bones of your computer. Therefore I don't guarantee that
it will interact with any running program or any active device in a totally
harmless manner. If you plan to start DFB, I recommend to stop any other running
user process and wait until all sensitive devices are idle. That is not a must
but reduces any risks (I run DFB in parallel to my communications software,
active CD-ROM and active audio system).
6. A wish of the author
Since I have access only to Intel machines, I would appreciate if you run the
tests using the dump option and drop me an email with a description of your
system and the resulting dump output. The command to achive this is
DFB /DMP 1> anyname.RES 2> anyname.DMP
If you can't reach me through Internet or Fidonet you may send your message to
Compuserve 100275,3253 (take this as a last resort only, it's a friends account,
so this route will take some time). I am interested in any AMD (the new K5/K6-
types only!)/IBM/UMC/CYRIX/TI/ST CPU and the brand new P24, P55, M2 and what
else may come. Everybody who provides me *new* information may consider him-/
herself as a registered user of a forthcoming shareware version (if there will
be one ...).
Since there were so many people, who sent me their results and expressed their
feelings about DFB, I could not respond to all of them individually in my scarse
spare time. So I'd like to say 'thank you very much!' this way. I case of
problems (they are more seldom with every new release) I try to investigate
them and assist as much as I can.
---