Is there single/multicore benchmark for CPUs that makes current-generation CPUs comparable with stuff from say the mid-90s onwards?
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Is there single/multicore benchmark for CPUs that makes current-generation CPUs comparable with stuff from say the mid-90s onwards?
I'd like to specifically compare how fast a G4 (e.g. PowerPC 7455) is versus current Apple M5.
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Is there single/multicore benchmark for CPUs that makes current-generation CPUs comparable with stuff from say the mid-90s onwards?
I'd like to specifically compare how fast a G4 (e.g. PowerPC 7455) is versus current Apple M5.
(I get that this is a somewhat hard problem because of various fuckeries that benchmarks and compilers do.)
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Is there single/multicore benchmark for CPUs that makes current-generation CPUs comparable with stuff from say the mid-90s onwards?
I'd like to specifically compare how fast a G4 (e.g. PowerPC 7455) is versus current Apple M5.
@thomasfuchs I found 7zip* to be a reasonably time-stable benchmark as it runs on almost any architecture and almost any CPU.
Of course, it doesn't really check anything besides (un)zipping things...
* e.g. 7z b -mmt1
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@thomasfuchs I found 7zip* to be a reasonably time-stable benchmark as it runs on almost any architecture and almost any CPU.
Of course, it doesn't really check anything besides (un)zipping things...
* e.g. 7z b -mmt1
@thomasfuchs Incidentally, I use it to "prove" that running #gentoo -march=native optimizations is worth about 15% performance-wise on workloads I never do

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Is there single/multicore benchmark for CPUs that makes current-generation CPUs comparable with stuff from say the mid-90s onwards?
I'd like to specifically compare how fast a G4 (e.g. PowerPC 7455) is versus current Apple M5.
@thomasfuchs someone ran a custom single threaded Dhrystone benchmark against various computers he used since 1976 - not sure if this is of interest? It isn't optimised and so gains from this and multi threading would be much better these days.
(Updated with a better source which includes a list of results and link to the GitHub repo for the benchmark)
From 1976 To Today, Dhrystone Benchmarks Reveal How Far CPUs Have Come
A set of benchmarks using the classic Dhrystone integer test show how far we've come in almost 50 years.
HotHardware (hothardware.com)
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(I get that this is a somewhat hard problem because of various fuckeries that benchmarks and compilers do.)
@thomasfuchs It looks like a few people have submitted Geekbench 2 scores from M4 Mac minis. https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/search?q=PowerMac10%2C2 vs. https://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/search?q=Mac16%2C10 would seem to show that a 10-core M4 is ~30 times faster than a 1.5 GHz G4. That sounds impressive at first blush, but that would mean that it's only three times faster per core, which is obviously wrong. Rosetta 2 would account for some of that, but not all of it.
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@thomasfuchs someone ran a custom single threaded Dhrystone benchmark against various computers he used since 1976 - not sure if this is of interest? It isn't optimised and so gains from this and multi threading would be much better these days.
(Updated with a better source which includes a list of results and link to the GitHub repo for the benchmark)
From 1976 To Today, Dhrystone Benchmarks Reveal How Far CPUs Have Come
A set of benchmarks using the classic Dhrystone integer test show how far we've come in almost 50 years.
HotHardware (hothardware.com)
@arakin yes!
I guessed my first Mac (1Ghz G4) was 50 times slower than my current Mac (M1 Max) and I was probably in the right ballpark
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Is there single/multicore benchmark for CPUs that makes current-generation CPUs comparable with stuff from say the mid-90s onwards?
I'd like to specifically compare how fast a G4 (e.g. PowerPC 7455) is versus current Apple M5.
@thomasfuchs @joe really janky way of estimating, but: the Cell PPE/Xenon cores (same uarch) were “essentially” dual G4s at half the clock frequency, since they were in-order and alternated two threads.
So if you can find a usable single threaded comparison between a modern system and the Xbox 360 or PS3, that’ll get you a hypothetical “1.6GHz G4 with less anemic frontside bus”.
Then you could try to estimate the remaining scaling by comparing G4s and extrapolating.
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@thomasfuchs @joe really janky way of estimating, but: the Cell PPE/Xenon cores (same uarch) were “essentially” dual G4s at half the clock frequency, since they were in-order and alternated two threads.
So if you can find a usable single threaded comparison between a modern system and the Xbox 360 or PS3, that’ll get you a hypothetical “1.6GHz G4 with less anemic frontside bus”.
Then you could try to estimate the remaining scaling by comparing G4s and extrapolating.
@thomasfuchs @joe as a calibration: the Switch 1 gets ~300-350 on geekbench 6, the M5 gets ~4300, and the Switch was a noticeable upgrade from the Wii U’s “1.24GHz G3 with weird non-AltiVec vectors” (should be vaguely G4-like), so any numbers you get showing less than 15x or so are probably suspect.
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