Re: [Hampshire] Novatech laptops

On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 02:43:16PM +0100, Alan Bell wrote:
> on the bogomips mini howto page there are several indications that
> BogoMIPS have a 1:1 (or sometimes 1:2) relationship with Mhz on MIPS and
> ARM archictectures.

It may be true of some MIPS and ARM processors, but these are really
families of architectures. A ratio of clock speed to BogoMIPS will only
hold true for a single architecture.

The processor you mentioned is its own architecture so there there's
really no way of predicting its ratio of clock speed to BogoMIPS without
knowing the architecture.

> Are there any other ways you can think of to
> determine the clock speed? I am indeed concerned about trade descriptions.

There's no other way of profiling this that will give you different
numbers. BogoMIPS is the effective rate at which the CPU executes
instructions and that's what all software can see. Unless the hardware
tells you in some way it's impossible to determine.

CPU MHz are irrelevant anyway. You can only gauge real-world performance
using benchmarks.

To sum up:

CPU MHz: times the pipeline(s) can advance per second
BogoMIPS: number of null operations per second
Benchmarks: number of operations of a realistic mixture per second

Dan