I'm using the bindists for some versions, and the ~simonmar/fp/ installs (which I've assumed are bindist) for the ones that already existed there (ie 7.0.1 to 7.4.1, excepting 7.0.4).
 
$ md5sum ghc*bz2
0fc26b4c1d10ff9dc8b0cbe9453d48d3  ghc-7.0.4-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.bz2
de67ecfe619b0126d8a8b93d26f34555  ghc-7.4.2-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.bz2
23da3285c5f8fe6716e2795d149c6b96  ghc-7.6.1-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.bz2
230270a985c522af939d9c71aa76343f  ghc-7.6.2-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.bz2
 


On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd@gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/02/13 03:17, Johan Tibell wrote:
Hi Nicolas!

I tried to reproduce the difference between 7.0.4 and 7.6.2 on the
exp3_8, wheel-sieve1, and primes and couldn't get the same percent
difference as you. We need to reconcile these differences somehow. Lets
start with more exact machine specs. I have a:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Program           Size    Allocs   Runtime   Elapsed  TotalMem
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      bernouilli          +3.3%     +0.2%      0.12      0.13     +0.0%
          exp3_8          +1.1%    +53.7%      0.14      0.14   +300.0%
     gen_regexps         +18.7%     +3.9%      0.00      0.00     +0.0%
       integrate          -0.1%    +39.0%      0.21      0.23     +0.0%
           kahan          +1.7%    +98.6%     +9.9%     +7.3%     +0.0%
       paraffins          +1.3%     -1.2%      0.06      0.08     +0.0%
          primes          +1.4%    +64.7%      0.04      0.05    +50.0%
          queens          +0.8%     -0.5%      0.02      0.02     +0.0%
            rfib          +1.7%    +42.8%      0.02      0.02     +0.0%
             tak          +0.9%    +12.0%      0.01      0.01     +0.0%
    wheel-sieve1          +0.8%    +66.6%     -4.6%     -5.8%    -12.5%
    wheel-sieve2          +0.9%     +0.0%      0.12      0.13     +0.0%
            x2n1         +10.3%    +87.3%      0.00      0.01   +200.0%
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Min          -0.1%     -1.2%     -4.6%     -5.8%    -12.5%
             Max         +18.7%    +98.6%     +9.9%     +7.3%   +300.0%
  Geometric Mean          +3.2%    +31.7%     +2.4%     +0.5%    +23.6%

Some of these benchmarks essentially do no allocation in their inner loops (x2nl, rfib, tak), so differences there just indicate changes in the IO library or elsewhere, and aren't significant.

Is your 7.6.2 from our binary distributions, or did you build it yourself?

Cheers,
        Simon