Comparison of build times

[Nick Payne]

I just built up a new PC to replace my ~four year old HP machine. I 
compared the lilypond build times on the old and new machines for the 
Reubke sonata on the 94th psalm. The old machine has 4Gb RAM and some 
sort of AMD dual core processor, the new machine has 6Gb RAM and an 
Intel i7 920 processor, which is the cheapest and slowest i7 processor. 
Both machines running Ubuntu 9.10 amd64.

HP machine build time: 617 seconds
New machine with all BIOS settings at auto: 240 seconds
New machine with BIOS Bclk setting raised from 133MHz to 160MHz (this 
raises the CPU clock speed from 2.66GHz to 3.2GHz): 193 seconds
New machine with BIOS Bclk setting raised to 180MHz (this raises the CPU 
clock speed to 3.6GHz): 182 seconds

I kept the RAM speed the same as I changed the CPU clock, so it looks 
like there is pretty much a direct inverse relationship between build 
time and CPU clock, with RAM and hard disk not really coming into the 
equation unless you don't have enough RAM. Also, at the highest CPU 
clock the 920 is actually running faster than the most expensive i7 CPU 
does at its stock speed, at about 1/3 the price, and I ran mprime on it 
overnight to check stability at that speed without finding any problem.

Nick