Ramspeed

Cache and memory benchmarking tool

RAMspeed is a command line utility to measure cache and memory performance of computer systems. It offers 18 cache and memory benchmarks for i386 and amd64 machines, though 6 only for alpha ones. There are *mark benchmarks such as INTmark, FLOATmark, MMXmark and SSEmark. They operate with linear sequential data streams passed through ALU, FPU, MMX and SSE units respectively. There are also *mem benchmarks such as INTmem, FLOATmem, MMXmem and SSEmem. These are supposed to illustrate how fast is actual read/write memory performance. There are also non-temporal versions of MMX and SSE benchmarks. They have been coded with special instructions to minimise cache pollution on memory reads and to eliminate it completely on memory writes. In addition, they operate with a built in aggressive data prefetching algorithm. In some cases, non-temporal MMXmark and SSEmark can deliver almost 100 of theoretical bandwidth while reading.