Simple performance test of rdrand

My new Lenovo X230 laptop is equipped with a Intel(R) i5-3210M CPU (2.5 GHz, with 3.1 GHz Turbo) which supports the new Digital Random Number Generator (DRNG) - a high performance entropy and random number generator.  The DNRG is read using the new Intel rdrand instruction which can return 64, 32 or 16 bit random numbers.

The DRNG is described in detail in this article and provides very useful code examples in assembler and C which I used to write a simple and naive test to see how well the rdrand performs on my i5-3210M.

For my test, I simply read 100 million 64 bit random numbers on a single thread. The Intel literature states one can get up to about 70 million rdrand invocations per second on 8 threads, so my simple test is rather naive as it only exercises rdrand on one thread.  For a set of 10 iterations on my test, I'm getting around 40-45 nanoseconds per rdrand, or about 22-25 million rdrands per second, which is really impressive.   The test is a mix of assembler and C, and is not totally optimal, so I am sure I can squeeze a little more performance out with some extra work.

The next test I suspect is to see just random the data is and to see how well it compares to other software random number generators... but I will tinker with that after my vacation.

Anyhow, for reference, the test can be found here in my git repository.