Linux Pentium III Chipset Comparison

Memory Performance: Unixbench and Nbench Benchmarks

The only real memory benchmark we could find for Linux is part of the Nbench benchmark application, which is a port of BYTEmark for Linux. These are index values, meant for comparison with each other. There is no direct correlation between these numbers and real world performance, but it is nevertheless a useful tool for looking at low level performance.

Nothing really special here. The Intel 815 led each of the others by about a percent.

Unixbench, the all encompassing UNIX benchmark, contains a 'Process Creation' index as well. Process creation refers to actually creating process control blocks and memory allocations for new processes, so this applies directly to memory bandwidth. Typically, this benchmark would be used to compare various implementations of operating system process creation calls, but we can safely use it as a memory index as well.

Here, we see the two Intel chipsets bettering the efforts of the VIA chipset. This is getting to be a growing trend across various aspects of this comparison. This reflects the differences we witnessed when testing the chipset in Windows-land as well.