8.27.2012

Kernel Race

Popcorn Kernel Like a lot of programmers, I run off of two different machines. I have both a desktop and a laptop. My desktop was one built for gaming about two and a half years ago. At the time I thought it was the speediest of machines, which wasn't entirely true. It's still a fairly beefy machine though. My laptop has fairly "similar" specs and has been a pretty decent dev machine as well. The interesting part is that for my Desktop I went AMD, and for my laptop I went Intel.

It's kind of difficult to compare the two processors I am going to pit against each other. AMD has always had more processing power, but less cache. Intel has always had less processing power, a little bit more cache and hyperthreading. This should be an interesting comparison.

System Maker Proc Model Clock Speed Num Cores (Physical/Virtual) Memory
Custom Desktop AMD Phenom II x4 955 BE 3.2 GHz 4/4 8 Gb
Lenovo T420 Intel Core i5 2520M 2.5 (3.2) GHz 2/4 8 Gb

Operating System Specs

System Linux Distro
Custom Desktop Ubuntu 12.04 Standard install
Lenovo T420 ArchLinux with DWM

Let's see how they compare! For my test I compiled the linux kernel version 3.6.0 using the default config that came with my Ubuntu 12.04 install on my desktop.

Interestingly, after the first test the kernel compile times were relatively similar. I thought that the desktop would waste my laptop, but the times were very close.


LENOVO T420 :: Core i5 2520M
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
real 29m7.789s
user 101m37.572s
sys 7m35.954s

DESKTOP :: PHENOM II x4 955 BE
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
real 28m26.318s
user 74m27.363s
sys 7m1.530s

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