What is Dhrystone?
| The Dhrystone Benchmark |
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Developed in 1984 by R.P. Wecker, Dhrystone is a benchmark program written in C or Pascal (and now even in Java) that tests a system's integer performance. The program is CPU bound, performing no I/O functions or operating system calls. Dhrystones per second is the metric used to measure the number of times the program can run in a second. The original Dhrystone benchmark is still widely used to measure CPU performance in industry under various versions or variants. The benchmark is designed to contain a representative sample of types of operations, mostly numerical, used by applications. Unfortunately this does not always represent a true real-life performance, but is useful to compare the speed of various CPUs. The Dhrystone benchmark used here is a multi-threaded, 32 or 64-bit variant of the original one which runs under UNIX. Up to 64 CPUs in SMP systems are supported. The result is determined by measuring the time it takes to perform some sequences of instructions. Due to various changes, the result is not directly comparable with other Dhrystone benchmarks. However the MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second) should be the same for the same system (+5-10% variation) between benchmarks. While the original benchmark does not compute anything, this version does check the results with the expected ones just in case there are problems with the CPU or memory. |
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