lame benchmarks (pun intended)

[krashan]

Can you please make a graph with all the non-altivec lame tests ? Because currently i can't understand the reall differences beetwen macs and x1000. Only what i see, is that non-altivec version on x1000 are the same by speed as macs with altivec one

As Piru linked (and I can confirm as a native Polish speaker), Mufa states that he used AltiVec accelerated LAME on X1000. Then on Piru graph all results except of AmigaOne 500 of course, are for AltiVec accelerated LAME.

[krashan]

Sorry if I've overlooked it, but can you confirm if the first graph and second graph are based on results carried out under the same conditions?

Piru simply has taken the X1000 result from the Mufa's graph. Mufa clearly states he used AltiVec enabled LAME on his X1000 to perform the test. At least he is convinced of it. So for X1000 it is just single result. For mac Mini 1.5 GHz we have two results: 33 seconds is without AltiVec, 17 seconds is with AltiVec.

[krashan]

And did he for sure use that AKsack.wav ?

Yes. In the first post he writes "Some time ago I've promised to Recedent, I will confront X1000 with his benchmarks". Then he links to tests performed by Recedent, where testfiles are listed. It is obvious in my opinion, that he used the same file.

[krashan]

If then it will be the same bad, then it will be kind of surprise.

It is not bad at all. MPEG Audio compression operates on relatively small data chunks, L2 cache is very well used. Then LAME is not speeded up much with very good performance of X1000 memory bus. So only clock frequency and processor efficiency counts. We have 7447A processor running at 1.42 GHz in Mac mini and PA6T processor running at 1.80 GHz in X1000. Then clock-wise X1000 is 25% faster. But then PA6T is based on IBM core, not on Freescale core. It is also designed to be more energy saving than 7447. For example AltiVec has one execution unit less compared to 7447. It is not impossible that PA6T "per megahertz" performance is by 25% lower compared to Freescale's e600 core used in 7447.

It resembles the case of Pentium 4, which was significantly slower "per megahertz" compared to Pentium III. On the other hand P4 could be clocked much higher due to its new design. Too bad in case of PA Semi the development has been killed prematurely.