CPU Maths Test

The CPU test exercises and verifies a wide range of CPU instructions, at user specified loads. The user selectable sub-categories of the CPU test are:

• General purpose instructions (x86)

• Floating Point Unit (FPU) instructions (x87)

• CPU extension instructions (x86 extensions).  The specific extension instructions may be selected:  SSE, SSE2.

• Prime number test

The numbers displayed in the test window for this test represent how many millions of CPU operations have been performed and verified. Each different math’s test is run for half a second. After all tests have been run the cycle count is incremented. The duty cycle and the CPU speed determine how many operations can be processed during the half second period. By default, a CPU test is run on each CPU core.

General purpose instructions

This test exercises and verifies correct operation of CPU instructions from the following groups:

•Integer mathematics (e.g. add, subtract, multiply and divide)

•Data transfer instructions (e.g. pushing/popping data to/from the stack)

•Bitwise logical instructions (e.g. bitwise and/or/xor)

•Shift and rotate instructions  (e.g. shift data left x number of bits)

•Logical instructions (e.g. equals)

•Control transfer instructions (e.g. jump on x greater than y)

•String instructions (eg. copy a text string)

Known and random data sets are used to exercise and verify correct operation. The random numbers are generated regularly to provide a larger data set, as well as ensure that the CPU caches overflow and that this mechanism is tested.

Floating Point Unit (FPU) instructions

This test exercises and verifies correct operation of CPU instructions from the following groups:

•Floating Point math (e.g. add, subtract, multiply and divide)

•Transcendental's (e.g. sin, cos)

Extension instructions (x86 extensions)

This test exercises extensions to the x86 CPU instruction set for a variety of applications, such as multimedia.

SSE : As above, but for SSE instructions. Instructions include moving SSE registers, adding, subtracting, and multiplying. Data set: groups of 4 x 32-bit floats (e.g. a,b,c,d) where a,b,c and d are 32-bit floats.

SSE2: As for the SSE test, but for SSE2 instructions. Data set: pairs of 64-bit floats (e.g. x,y) where x,y are 64-bit floats.

Prime number

This test exercises and verifies correct operation of CPU through the use of a prime number generation algorithm.

Helpful command line tool:

[your_command_line_prompt]# cat /proc/cpuinfo

This command will show your CPU info, including speed, cache size and features.