I've had a quick blast with ibt lately, just got v2.51 although don't think it has any impact on my processor (555BE unlocked to x4) with avx?? anyway was just wondering if the result which obviously can be compared to other processors, how much impact this result actually has in real world usage. I average just over 50gflops no matter the stress level.
Cheers
You have to first of all understand what does Flops actually mean?
Flops stand for Floating Point Operations Per Second.
In simplistic terms Floating point operations involve multiplication, division, subtraction, addition, trignometric functions etc of
real numbers involving decimal points.
Afaik all modern CPUs are native integer processors thus can't carry out real number calculations on their own. What does carry out flops calculations is known as Floating Point Unit (FPU) or math co-processor. FPU may well be part of CPU or separate chips on mobo.
Flops can involve many different kind of instructions such as division, trignometric, square root etc.
Intel Burn Test makes use of
multi-add instructions. So multiply two real numbers and then add the final result to an initial value.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply-accumulate_operation
Intel Burn test is also a double precision (64-bit) stress test program. Double precision in simplistic term just means that very large numbers with more decimal points can be computed compared to single-precision (32-bit) programs.
Modern cpus excluding Sandybridge such as Core 2, nehalem, amd phenom can carry out 4 Flops or 2 multi+2add instructions in a single CPU cycle in double precision.
The speed of a cpu such as 3GHz means it can operate 3 billion cycles per second.
If one core can carry out 4 flops per cycle then 4 cores processor can carry out 16 flops per cycle.
So a 3 Ghz Quad can theoretically carry out:
4 cores x 4 flops per core per cycle x cpu speed (total no of cycles generated per second) = 4 x 4 x 3Ghz = 48 Gflops or 48 billion floating point operations per second.
AMD 555BE doesn't support AVX instructions which just double the flops from 4 to 8 in double precision and is supported in Sandy Bridge and upcoming AMD Bulldozer.
Flops is a measure of cpu processing speed and is often used as a benchmark to compare the processing speeds of different cpus.
Intel Burn Test stress level just means the amount of ram you want to use for the test. IBT ram is used to store matrix problem size which then gets solved using
Gaussian Elimination method and results are outputted in Gflops.
The higher stress level or more ram you use, the bigger matrix size will be and during each run, your cpu will be under greater duration of load. Ram usage is independant of Gflops

. Higher stress level won't get you more Gflops for the same cpu speed.
I hope it hasn't been too complicated

although other members such as xsistor can explain you better although he might make it even more complicated to understand
