[Vm-dev] Benchmarks on Cuis 5.0 Spur + newest Cog VM

[Luciano Notarfrancesco]

Wow, the new VM is faaast!  (I know, I'm a little late on the game, I
just finished migrating my code to a new image.)

I'm comparing Cuis 5.0 Spur + newest Cog VM (32 bits) against Cuis 4.5
Cog r3370 from 2015-6. Soon we'll see how things go with 64 bits too.

All my benchmarks run faster. Integer arithmetic has improved (the
simplest benchmark of '1000!' get speedup by 4.5x). Other more complex
benchmarks that don't depend on large integer arithmetic run much
faster too, like Groebner bases over Z/p with small p, as well as
computing with permutation groups. Overall, the speedup is 1.5x to 5x,
in some cases more.

In one particular case (cyclic 7 Groebner basis over the prime field
Z/32003, a standard benchmark for computer algebra systems) the
speedup factor is 600x. But this seems to be a bug, either in the old
VM/image combo or the new one, or something in my code that behaves
differently in the new VM/image, because they don't produce the same
output. I'll investigate it. Other than that, over 400 tests passed
without problem.

So, thanks to all that made this possible, specially Eliot and the
vm-dev team, and Juan for migrating Cuis to Spur. Awesome work!
Luciano