Linux Pentium III Chipset Comparison

Kernel 2.4.0-test11 Compilation

Kernel compilation. Most Linux users will have to do it at some point in their Linux career. From a benchmarking perspective, it is interesting for a few reasons. First, it's a real world test. Second, disk, memory and cpu speeds all factor directly into the resulting times. Due to Linux's extremely aggressive caching, disk throughput is less of an issue, but CPU utilization while working with the disk becomes an issue. Further, memory bandwidth becomes the largest factor in overall time as the compiler needs it as well as the kernel's file system cache that is being used to minimize disk reads and writes. We're not going to give this benchmark a category. It's intended to provide a more overall feel for system performance dependent on many parts of the chipset.

Note that we're looking at compilation times here, so a lower value is better. Again, we see the two Intel chipsets outperforming the VIA, although not by an enormous figure. The VIA performed 6% slower than the BX chipset, which posted the fastest kernel compilation time.