Tyan Tomcat K8E

For a benchmark to better focus on CPU performance, we're measuring the time it takes to archive and extract a file. The file used for tar archiving is the FedoraCore3 i386 CD1 ISO measuring in at a hefty 617MB. After the file was archived, we also timed how long it took to extract the newly created archive.

Onto some compiling fun, we timed how long it took to compile LAME (3.96.1). LAME is a popular MP3 encoder for Linux. GCC 3.4.3 was used as the compiler.

With LAME, which was compiled for the last benchmark, we timed how long it took LAME to encode an 81.3MB wav file to an MP3. The audio file we used was entitled Klein Mandelbrot from the Blue Man Group.

Finally, for the last set of benchmarks we have three tests from Blue Sail Software. The three benchmarks include Vector Scalar Product, Sparse-Vector Scalar Product, and Singular Value Decomposition. As Blue Sail Software offers these Opstone benchmarks in different builds, depending upon the processor, we used the Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon 64 builds, respectively.