The warmup project

Objectives

The main objective of the warmup project is to simply create a benchmark system very similar to NBench, but with the difference of being Free Software, so that it can be redistributed by distributions.

One intention is to serve as a way to compare the processing speed of different architectures and give at least partial answers to basic questions like:

• "Should I run a 32 bit distribution or a 64 bit one with my computer?"
• "I just bought a new computer. Is it faster than my older one?"
• "How fast/slow is this ARM CPU compared to my desktop?"
• "Compiler X was just released today. Does it generate faster programs than compiler Y?"

There is, of course, no one-size-fits-all solution, but since one of the first things that we want is to know the CPU/processing speed of programs, that's what we want for this project.

We deliberately and completely ignore things like peripherals (network cards, disks etc.), at least for the moment.