When I first got Debian Squeeze running on my Dockstar, I tried a quick CPU test just to see how the Dockstar compared with my SheevaPlug. I ran
Quote
factor 9876543210123456781
which I find is a quick and dirty, but pretty good test of raw CPU horsepower. What I found sort of shocked me: The Dockstar was taking over 10 minutes to determine this was a prime number, while the SheevaPlug could do it in 7. (And, my Pentium desktop can do it in about 10 seconds, but that's another story.)
Not willing to believe there was that much difference between the two ARM boxes, I copied the Ubuntu version of the factor command over to the Dockstar. Voila! The Dockstar could now factor as fast as the SheevaPlug.
But, this begs the question: I'm pretty sure the two generics don't have vastly different incarnations of the 'factor' command, so what is Ubuntu doing to make theirs faster? Are they using higher levels of optimization, and if so, why isn't Squeeze using them, too?