John the Ripper

Out of all of our synthetic benchmarks, John the Ripper is perhaps the most robust; we can benchmark a wide range of encryption algorithms with many or no options very easily and quickly. For this benchmark, we downloaded John the Ripper 1.6. We had originally intended to build the program with the generic Linux make configuration. Unfortunately, John did not want to play nicely with that idea. We only ran the Intel CPU with HyperThreading for this portion of the benchmark.

linux:~/john-1.6/src # make linux-x86-any-elf
ln -sf x86-any.h arch.h
make ../run/john ../run/unshadow ../run/unafs ../run/unique \
JOHN_OBJS="DES_fmt.o DES_std.o BSDI_fmt.o MD5_fmt.o MD5_std.o BF_fmt.o BF_std.o AFS_fmt.o LM_fmt.o batch.o bench.o charset.o common.o compiler.o config.o cracker.o external.o formats.o getopt.o idle.o inc.o john.o list.o loader.o logger.o math.o memory.o misc.o options.o params.o path.o recovery.o rpp.o rules.o signals.o single.o status.o tty.o wordlist.o unshadow.o unafs.o unique.o x86.o" \
CFLAGS="-c -Wall -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -m486"
make[1]: Entering directory '/root/john-1.6/src'
gcc -c -Wall -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -m486 -funroll-loops DES_fmt.c
'-m486' is deprecated. Use '-march=i486' or '-mcpu=i486' instead.
cc1: error: CPU you selected does not support x86-64 instruction set
make[1]: *** [DES_fmt.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory '/root/john-1.6/src'
make: *** [linux-x86-any-elf] Error 2

Undeterred, we proceeded to build John with the generic configuration instead. John optimizes itself during the build, so you may view the builds of each configuration here (Intel) and here (AMD).

For those of you who downloaded the text files, you already know that the Intel CPU has pulled ahead, at least according to John. Below are some of the scores John posted while testing the utility.

John the Ripper 1.6 - Blowfish x32

John the Ripper 1.6 - FreeBSD MD5

John the Ripper 1.6 - DES x725 64/64 BS

As we saw in the intensive math benchmarks, the Athlon 64 has trouble keeping up with the Intel CPU.

Synthetic Benchmarks (continued) Conclusions
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  • T8000 - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    I think it is justified to put the 3500+ in its place here. Either it is overrated or its 64 bit support is more of a marketing statement.

    For those wanting an 3800+ in the review, just add a little under 10% to the 3500+, since the 3800+ has about 10% more clockspeed and it usually scales close to that. Not that it would change that much, it would only make things worse for AMD fanboys, seeing the 3800+ unable to hold its own against a real 3.6 Ghz CPU.

    Besides, you are welcome to try these tests at home with your FX53 or Opteron x50 and submit some scores. Don't have one? Don't worry, AMD hardly sells them anyway, especially to home users, since most users that can afford them do not buy AMD.
  • matman326 - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    Very disappointing.... thats all i'm gonna say.
  • wildguy2k - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    "Even a intel fanyboy has to laugh at how off sided this failure of a "review" was.

    Come on anandtech, if we wanted to read stuff like this we go to tom's"

    Exactly. Also, to all those who say that 200MHz & 512KB of cache don't really make much difference, there's an article on this same site that may point out the very difference they provide. Now, I know it's not utilizing the 64bit extensions, but this image
    (http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/athlon%2064%203... DOES show a 10% difference between the FX-53 & the 3500+ while compiling...
  • rocketbuddha - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

  • AlexWade - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    Okay, deep breath ...

    Obviously, the Prescott does some nice math work. I'll keep that in mind. But, most of us, and I'll tend to believe most servers, don't crunch numbers all day. I wanted to see more benchmarks on stuff that is more likely to get done, not finding prime numbers. More encoding, more games, more SQL, more compiling, only one or two math benchmarks.

    It is NOT a fair comparision of A64's weakness vs. Prescott's new strength on 60%+ benchmarks.

    It is a fair comparision of CPU's. Although, not the best. The Opteron and Athlon64 come from the same mold. Variations aren't going to be that minor.

    Please, next benchmark, make it more well-rounded. I could give a flip about Super Pi .
  • classy - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    I see no basis at all for this article. If you only had benchmarks for the 3500+ you should have even written this article. In all the years on Anandtech, I don't ever recall an article as uninformative as this one. Its nice to see the Athlon win a couple of benchmarks, but this is a very needless comparison.
  • Marlin1975 - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    Even a intel fanyboy has to laugh at how off sided this failure of a "review" was.

    Come on anandtech, if we wanted to read stuff like this we go to tom's
  • Pollock - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    I just want to throw my comment in here that I agree with most of the other people here. The conclusion is what I find most ridiculous.

    "Without a doubt, the 3.6GHz Xeon trounces over the Athlon 64 in math-intensive benchmarks."

    Like many other people said, I find that statement very unfair, again considering it wasn't against a similar chip.
  • bhtooefr - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    OK, I posted that last comment in reply to one on the previous page, and didn't realize that some of the benchmarks were 32-bit ones, either by accident, or to make the AMD smearing more obvious...
  • bhtooefr - Monday, August 9, 2004 - link

    All of the benchmarks were 64-bit. They couldn't have thrown in a regular Xeon 3.6, because it wouldn't be able to run the OS or the benchmarking apps.

    They should be testing chips against others in their price range and PR rating range. So, here's what they should have tested (I noticed further down why they used the 3500+ ($346):

    Pentium 4 560 EM64T (3.6GHz, $637)
    Pentium 4 550 EM64T (3.4GHz, $417)
    Pentium 4 540 EM64T (3.2GHz, $278)

    I obtained these P4 prices from Intel's price list. While these prices are for the NON-EM64T chips, I read in a press release that Intel isn't charging any more for EM64T.

    If they did it right, with the Xeon DP 3.6, here are the CPUs:

    Xeon DP 3.6 EM64T ($851)
    Opteron 250 ($851 - looks like it's aligned EXACTLY against the DP 3.6)

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