Host Specs vs Emulated Performance

I know the FreeAXP isn't even in public beta yet, but I am quite excited about the product.

With any emulator, the more powerful the host machine, the better the emulated guest performs. Has there been any formal performance benchmarking from running in various hosts to those of hardware Alphas?

For example, I have a 2.21ghz Intel core2duo, 64-bit, 2GB of RAM. Is there a rough estimate on how it would compare to say a AlphaServer 400 4/233?

I have used PersonalAlpha in the past, but performance was a bit too sluggish.

Thanks! I am looking forward to the public beta.

Rob<hr>

No performance data yet. We'll post it when we have it, but it will not be for a while.

FreeAXP performance is highly dependent upon the Host O/S (x86 vs x64) and the speed of the underlying hardware. The beta releases of FreeAXP (1.n.n.n) will be slower than the production releases (2.0 and higher, not yet available).

I've posted the VMS VUPs procedure we use to get a quick look at relative performance in this thread: <a href=" www.openvmshobbyist.com/forum/viewthread...id=163&thread_id=842 " target='_blank'> www.openvmshobbyist.com/forum/viewthread...id=163&thread_id=842

On our test rigs under OpenVMS 7.3-2, the VUPs score ranges from 8.8 on a 5 year old Compaq laptop running Windows XP x86 on a P4 with hyper-threading and 1GB of memory to the low 20's running on a 9-month old development box running Windows 7 x64 and sporting Intel dual quad-cores with 8GB of memory. By way of comparison, a genuine AlphaServer 400/166 equipped with 384MB of memory produces a VUPs score of 27.1.

Feel free to post your VUP scores in this thread. Please list the following information with the scores:

- Host Hardware
- Host O/S
- FreeAXP (or other emulator) version
- VMS version
- VUPs score

We don't currently have a good benchmark to run under Tru64. We'll be happy to use and post one if a Tru64 user cares to contribute one.

Just for informational purposes, I ran the VUPs calculation routine kindly provided by Bruce using my current PersonalAlpha installation. The results are as folllows :-

- Host Hardware Intel Core 2 Duo 3ghz E8400
4gb DDR2 Memory, Seagate SATA 7200 500gb hard drive

- Host O/S Windows XP Pro SP3 (32 bit)
- PersonalAlpha version 2.0.16
- VMS version 8.3
- VUPs score 22.2

I expect the FreeAXP beta version will be slower than this on my hardware setup. As Bruce has indicated, the official release version should be quicker than the FreeAXP beta.

Excellent communications from Bruce. Thanks for keeping us updated so well.

HERE ARE A FEW MORE VUP SCORES FOR PERSONAL ALPHA INCLUDING A NETBOOK

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Performance was much slower than I expected on this one

- Host Hardware Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66ghz E6700
4gb DDR2 Memory, Seagate SATA 7200 500gb hard drive

- Host O/S Windows XP Pro SP3 (32 bit)
- PersonalAlpha version 2.0.16
- VMS version 8.3
- VUPs score 13.8 (Surprisingly poor compared to the E8400 core 2)

This next one might surprise a few people. I was quite impressed.

- Host Hardware Asus Eee Netbook 1005HAB Intel Atom N270 1.6ghz
1gb DDR2 Memory, 160gb hard drive

- Host O/S Windows XP Home SP3 (32 bit)
- PersonalAlpha version 2.0.16
- VMS version 8.3
- VUPs score 7.6 (Surprisingly good as it is only a netbook)<hr>

For comparison, I ran the DCL script posted on my AlphaServer DS10/466.

-Hardware - Compaq AlphaServer DS10/466 with 1GB RAM
-OpenVMS Version 8.3 (Hobbyist Distro)
-Approximate System VUPs Rating : 958.0 (does this sound too high?)

I'll also run it on my PersonalAlpha box and try FreeAXP on that machine as well. Unfortunately, I don't have access to that machine at the moment.

Integrity RX2600
System: PHENIX, HP rx2600 (1.50GHz/6.0M<img src='../images/smiley/cool.gif' alt='smiley'>
VMS 8.3
Dual 1.5

VUPs: 521.0