JavaScript Benchmarks

Whenever I play with a new computer, one of the things I like to do is run some JavaScript benchmarks (BenchJS.) It's a useful benchmark, since if I'm going to use the computer a lot, chances are that I'll spend a lot of time browsing the web on it. So JavaScript performance will be noticeable to me.

I have two computers at work. The first is a Dell Optiplex. It has a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 with a 1.5 GB of RAM. I've never had a computer clocked at 3 GHz before. That was near the pinnacle of the NetBurst architecture.

The second computer is an IBM ThinkPad T43p. It has a 2.1 GHz Pentium-M with 2 GB of RAM. Again this was near the pinnacle of the single core Pentium-M's. It has some other nice features, maybe I'll blog about it so more later.

Finally, I recently upgraded my home computer. It's still an AMD 64X2 3800+. I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB. I also upgraded the video card, but I don't think that would matter much for JavaScript performance. I've bought a new hard drive for it, but haven't installed it yet. Again I doubt that would matter. I'm also already bought Vista for it, and will upgrade it soon. Maybe this week, or maybe next weekend, whenever I have time.

Right now, all three computers in question are running Windows XP. I ran Firefox 2.0.03, IE 7, and Opera 9.10. Here are the results:

Setup Browser Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Test 6 Test 7 Total Pentium4-3.0 GHz/1.5 GB RAM Firefox 2 1.594 1.344 0.594 0.547 0.266 2.468 1.594 8.407 Pentium4-3.0 GHz/1.5 GB RAM IE 7 1.578 6.203 0.547 0.703 0.422 1.796 0.688 11.937 Pentium4-3.0 GHz/1.5 GB RAM Opera 9 1.563 1.156 0.438 0.312 0.078 2.156 0.641 6.344 Pentium-M/2.1 GHz/2.0 GB RAM Firefox 2 1.672 0.844 0.39 0.406 0.156 1.61 0.719 5.797 Pentium-M/2.1 GHz/2.0 GB RAM IE 7 1.562 2.969 0.344 0.75 0.453 1.328 0.672 8.078 Pentium-M/2.1 GHz/2.0 GB RAM Opera 9 1.562 0.437 0.282 0.265 0.063 1.328 0.422 4.359 AMD 64X2 3800+/ 2.0 GB RAM Firefox 2 1.609 0.906 0.344 0.609 0.171 1.594 1.875 7.108 AMD 64X2 3800+/ 2.0 GB RAM IE 7 1.563 3.328 0.375 0.657 0.687 1.391 0.718 8.719 AMD 64X2 3800+/ 2.0 GB RAM Opera 9 1.563 0.516 0.297 0.281 0.078 1.422 0.469 4.626

Interesting results! From the browsers, Opera was always faster than Firefox and Firefox was always faster than IE. No surprises here. I was most surprised to see how well the Pentium-M performed. I thought the AMD would beat it out, but it did not. The biggest difference between the two was on the last test. This test calculates the day of the week for Christmas day for the next 1000 years. This test accounted for almost all of the Pentium-M's advantage on each system. I'd be interested to see the JS code for this, but one would think that it would come down to a lot of integer math. So it would make sense that the Pentium-M would have an advantage here. Actually, you gotta wonder why the P4 didn't do better on this test.