Just how fast is a NetWinder?
This is a very frequently asked question on the mailing lists. The answer is it depends. For certain instruction mixes, the StrongARM processor used in the NetWinder can be very fast. For example, its integer multiplication operation is very fast. If the program fragment of interest fits in the cache, the short instruction timing of the RISC processor becomes your friend. On general operations, the NetWinder can feel like a 180MHz to 200MHz Pentium. For floating point intensive operations, it will be much slower since it does not include a hardware FPU. (Eric LaForest and Stanislav Vardomskiy posted some benchmark results to the devel mailing list on 18 July 1998, which can be retrieved from the archives.) On May 24th, Andrew Mileski reported that Distributed.net’s RC5-64 client was running at 364.40 kkeys/sec on his NetWinder. It should be noted that using different versions of the GCC compiler to compile something on different architectures is not a good benchmarking tool. You end up
