What is Linpack Xtreme?
Linpack Xtreme is a popular benchmarking and stress testing application used to measure a computer's floating point operations per second (FLOPS). It is a port of the original Linpack benchmark program, optimized to fully utilize modern CPUs and test them under intensive workloads.
The test runs complex linear algebra calculations using floating point math, maximizing the utilization of Floating Point Units (FPUs) on the CPU. It scales up the problem size and number of computations to really stress the processor and RAM. The final metric measured is GFLOPS (billions of floating point operations per second).
Linpack Xtreme is useful for things like:
- Testing overclock settings on PCs to ensure stability under heavy load.
- Comparing theoretical peak FLOPS to real-world achievable FLOPS.
- Stability testing new computer builds and components.
- Benchmarking different CPUs, computers and platforms for raw math/number crunching performance.
The intense nature of the benchmark makes it widely used by overclocking enthusiasts to stress test modified systems. It is also added to some distro overclocking-focused Linux operating systems. But it mainly serves as a standardized test for measuring and comparing the floating point computational abilities of hardware.