is it really a 750 Mhz Athlon running FreeBSD?

[Al Kelley]

here's the thing:

   your machine: 750MHz AMD Athlon running FreeBSD

     my machine: 1.7 ghz intel p4 machine running cygwin on top 
                 of win 2000 with 512 mbytes of rambus 800 memory

i am well aware that cywin is not the same as linux, or freebsd,
but still, my machine looks respectable vis-a-vis yours.  but
look at the times, with both machines using gmp, to compute
the expression

   2^300000 - 1

here is the output from your machine:

  The result of executing 2^300000 - 1 is:

   computation took 0.10 ms
   output conversion took 108.00 ms
   997009265504475254620475559109111984747096395199303189348021
   079441529004814191919938916876330688058970545104037536055243
   .....

your time in seconds is 0.10810 whereas my time is 6.04800.
this implies that your machine is

   55.948 times faster

than my machine.  somehow, this does not seem right.
the output, by the way, of both machines match,
at least for the beginning and ending digits.
[[i did not bother to check every digit,
of which there are over 90,000.]]

Torbjorn Granlund wrote:
> 
> Al Kelley <blufox@cats.ucsc.edu> writes:
> 
>   question:
>      is this really a 750MHz AMD Athlon running FreeBSD?
>      it seems way too fast for such a machine.
> 
> Yes, it is.  Does GMP run slower for you on similar hardware?
> 
> b> dmesg | head
> Copyright (c) 1992-2000 The FreeBSD Project.
> Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
>         The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
> FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE #0: Mon Nov 20 13:02:55 GMT 2000
>     jkh@bento.FreeBSD.org:/usr/src/sys/compile/GENERIC
> Timecounter "i8254"  frequency 1193182 Hz
> CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) Processor (755.29-MHz 686-class CPU)
>   Origin = "AuthenticAMD"  Id = 0x621  Stepping = 1
>   Features=0x183f9ff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR>
>   AMD Features=0xc0400000<AMIE,DSP,3DNow!>
> 
> --
> Torbjörn