The STREAM tests
are exercising simple instructions on arrays larger than the CPU's
cache. The memory access is mostly sequential. The results are
illustrative for raw speed of CPU/Cache/RAM on large problems.
We run the standard version of the tests that allow comparison with other systems (please see the data on the STREAM website), and a modified version with a much larger footprint. The results are represented as memory bandwidth (MB/s).
STREAM standard benchmarks (45.8 MB of RAM)
Large STREAM ( 457.8 MB of RAM)
Observations
The memory bandwidth doesn't depend too much of the OS (as expected).
It looks like the STREAM tests are a good indication of the FSB
"speed". The older Xeon 533 FSB CPU has about 66% of the bandwidth of
the newer 800 FSB Xeon (as expected).