Following up on my How Long for Long Pi posts from Thursday and Friday I wanted to start quantifying the data a little more. I was able to gather data from 5 Intel computers. They are:
| CPU Type | CPU Generation | Form Factor |
| Intel i7 | 12th Generation | Homebuilt Desktop |
| Intel i7 | 10th Generation | Legion Laptop |
| Intel i7 | 8th Generation | Yoga Laptop |
| Intel i7 | 7th Generation | Asus ROG Desktop |
| Intel i7 | 7th Generation | Yoga Laptop |
My testing methodology was to run 3 passes of the test calculating Pi to 100,000 places via a Python 3 script (see Friday’s post) and then to 1,000,000 places. All 5 machines ran native Windows. (The Legion Laptop and 7th Gen Yoga are Win 10, the others Windows 11). On 4 of those machines I could dual boot into Ubuntu 20 Linux from a USB SSD drive.
I was surprised that the Ubuntu versions averaged 13.7% faster calculation time than the Windows machines. I don’t have the details to drill down further to attribute that to the overhead of the operating system or to efficiency of the versions of Python 3.10 or just something else entirely.
When you spend more time calculating, you find an even bigger difference in times. Ubuntu calculations were 28.3% faster at this length of calculation. The other thing that jumped out at me in both calculations was that a 7th Gen Desktop was faster than an 8th Gen Laptop (4.3% on Ubuntu 1 Million) While all these processors are multi-core, it appeared to me that all these were running in a single processor while calculating, using Task Manager on Windows and htop on Ubuntu.
Testing of all 5 versions of Raspberry Pi (0W, 1, 2, 3, 4) are underway. I’ve also got some other devices to test, and I was surprised to see a handheld device outperform one of the 7th Gen Intel machines at a Million places.
Again, please feel free to provide comments on my Twitter – @N4BFR.