Performance - Dhrystone | Whetstone

DhryStone CPU test

We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test from SiSoftware Sandra, which is basically a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs. Since the whole program should be really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.

The first stop is the SANDRA Dhrystone and Whetstone tests. These two tests are pure, unadulterated 100% CPU tests that run completely within the CPU + cache memory itself. A perfect test to observe the general efficiency per core.

Though one of the oldest, Dhrystone remains a simple yet accurate and effective way to show you RAW CPU processing performance making it a good indicator. The rest of the processors are in the chart just for scaling.

We'll show the perf results of the Core i7 3770K on the MSI Z77 Mpower. Next to that we have overclocked the K model processor to 5 GHz (on air as shown in the overclocking segment). ALL our tests today will show the overclocked results where applicable as well. Not a bad overclock for a processor in this price range eh ?

Whetstone FPU

The Whetstone benchmark is a synthetic benchmark for evaluating the performance of computers. It was initially written in Algol 60, back in 1972. The Whetstone benchmark originally measured computing power in units of kilo-Whetstone Instructions Per Second (kWIPS). This was later changed to Millions of Whetstone Instructions Per Second (MWIPS).

The Whetstone benchmark primarily measures the floating-point (FPU) arithmetic performance. A similar benchmark for integer and string operations is thus Dhrystone.