SciMark2 and Delphi

Your reviewer was surprised with SciMark test ported to Delphi that Mr. Phillip Goh posted.

On a Core i7-2600K it achieved:

**                                                              **
** SciMark2 Numeric Benchmark, see http://math.nist.gov/scimark **
** for details. (Results can be submitted to pozo@nist.gov)     **
**                                                              **
Using       2.00 seconds min time per kenel.
Composite Score:         1885.62
FFT             Mflops:  1426.20    (N=1024)
SOR             Mflops:  1146.66    (100 x 100)
MonteCarlo:     Mflops:   515.48
Sparse matmult  Mflops:  2096.31    (N=1000, nz=5000)
LU              Mflops:  4243.46    (M=100, N=100)

With same Delphi version:

**                                                               **
** SciMark2a Numeric Benchmark, see http://math.nist.gov/scimark **
**                                                               **
** Delphi Port, see http://code.google.com/p/scimark-delphi/     **
**                                                               **
Mininum running time = 2.00 seconds
Composite Score MFlops:   576.03
FFT             Mflops:   363.08    (N=1024)
SOR             Mflops:   935.87    (100 x 100)
MonteCarlo:     Mflops:   181.13
Sparse matmult  Mflops:   488.35    (N=1000, nz=5000)
LU              Mflops:   911.74    (M=100, N=100)

Readers are welcome to submit their own tests and find their own conclusions.
The C++ version is 3.2 times faster than Delphi version.

Readers can download the test at http://code.google.com/p/scimark-delphi and run it on their own computers.


There are deep implications beyond MFlops, FFT, LU and other metric tests.

Suppose you tell an organization to "get the latest hardware" to run your Delphi apps faster.

This benchmark was run on an Intel Core i7-2600K, 3.4GHZ (TurboBoost to 3.7GHZ). This is quite expensive for consumers. Most corporations would probably buy a Core i3 or Core i5 to give to their staff to use. If the program is not optimized to take advantage of latest hardware, it's like telling whatever expensive hardware you give it, it gives very little performance gains.

Suppose you're the developer creating these wonderful apps that sell for money but for some reason, there's this part which takes incredibly long, like generating reports, crunching numbers for sales report, making that graph (licensed from TeeChart) or computational intensive operation (like posting to proprietary Delphi Database). It takes hours or maybe a whole day to generate report.

Your competitor uses C# (or JavaScript or C++) and then makes a competing app, which seems to be 30 or maybe 50 times quicker than your app. What happens next?

You can foresee trouble that starts to brew.

Update 1:
The benchmark for Delphi is from Mr. Phillip Goh's Google Code site. Download the link from that GoogleCode website, it comes with 3 EXE files. From looking at the binary, it is GCC.