Hmmm ... could it be that some systems calculate smaller numbers of digits of pi faster than others, but then slow down as the numbers of digits increases ? So then how many digits of pi would be a useful benchmark for all systems ? Or would a graph of times at all numbers of digits be more useful ?
Very very interesting idea. I think it is worth looking into, because the Intel chip processed the 6000 digits much faster than the athlon, but the 20000 calculations were comparable.
Like I said before, nobody survives in the semiconductor world by selling a chip that in general is twice slower than the competition for the same money, but I would expect one chip to excel in certain limited situations (and similarly the other one to excel in other limited situations).
It would be trivial to modify the program to compute multiple lengths of Pi and report them all at once, given the way that I structured the Pi benchmark into a subroutine that takes numdigits as an argument and returns seconds.
I could do it later this week if one of you doesn't have time.
Some different types of calcuilations would really be cool... I'd love to see matrix inversion results. If we used Octave like I suggested, Toadlife's PC would probably kick the crap out of all the rest of ours because Octave is multithreaded and would use both his cores to solve the problem.
