At about 3pm today a monster was born in the office where I work - a 64bit Linux monster
The machine arrived at last - we now have a living, breathing 64bit Athlon 3200, with 1Gb of RAM and 160Gb hard drive. Although we haven’t had a chance to test it out yet on anything worth doing, the apparent speed already is breathtaking. From memory, the “bogomips” rating is up around the 8000 mark, which for a “built on the cheap” machine is incredible…
To quote a Unix website…“BogoMips” is a combination of Bogus and Mips. MIPS stands for (depending on who you ask) Millions of Instructions per Second, or Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed.
The number printed at boot time is the result of a kernel timing calibration, used for very short delay loops by some device drivers.
So how does a rating of 8000 compare? Well, it’s faster than the fastest (expensive) Intel chip by quite some margin…
The reason I ended up setting up the Linux box rather than get on with more pressing work is that Microsoft conspired against me to stop me getting on with anything. I have been working on a virtual machine with Windows 2003 server on it. Due to a faulty memory chip in my machine, I have had to reduce the amount of memory the virtual machine thinks it has (i.e. a portion of my real computer’s memory). Upon doing this however, Windows has turned around and told me it needs to be re-activated… only this virtual machine can’t see the network, and I can’t get into windows (because of the activation problem) to let it see the network… plus I can’t call Microsoft because I don’t have the relevant information to do that (I have to wait until a sysadmin returns to the office tomorrow)…
Aaarrgghhsince I started working on it.
I might write later if I get a chance. If you want to interrupt me, I run Trillian most of the time so feel free to message me via any of the means on the right of my blog Hell - I’ll even leave Skype on.
(and for those who are wondering, the computer in the picture is the WOPR from the movie War Games - fantastic movie, and the best name for a computer since HAL…)