Linux and EM64T; Intel's 64-bit Suggestion

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.

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