AMD ATHLON 64 - Manual (Page 18)

18 Experimental Setup Chapter 2
40555 Rev. 3.00 June 2006
Performance Guidelines for AMD Athlon™ 64 and AMD Opteron™
ccNUMA Multiprocessor Systems
2.3.2 Labels Used
Each of the bars on the graph is labeled with the hop information for the thread.
2.3.3 Y-Axis Display
For the one-thread test cases on the idle system, the graphs show the time taken by a single thread,
normalized to the time taken by the fastest single-thread case—in this case the time it takes a read-
only thread to do local accesses on an idle system.
In Figure 3 on page 17, the time taken by the 0.0.w.0 case is normalized to the time taken by 0.0.r.0
case. The reason for the different times recorded for these two cases is explained later.
For the two-thread test cases on an idle system, the graphs show the total time taken by both threads,
normalized to the time taken by the fastest two-thread case—in this case the time it takes two read-
only threads running on different nodes to do local accesses on an idle system.
These graphs are further enhanced by rerunning the two-thread cases with some background threads.
For the two-thread test cases with a background load, the graphs show the total time taken by the two
test (foreground) threads normalized as before. The time taken by the background threads is not
measured. Only the effect of background threads on the performance of test threads is evaluated by
measuring the time taken by the test threads. The load imposed by the background threads is varied
from low to very high and graphs are plotted for the individual load scenarios.