Prime number calculation fun

Question

We're having a bit of fun here at work. It all started with one of the guys setting up a Hackintosh and we were wondering whether it was faster than a Windows Box of (nearly) same specs that we have. So we decided to write a little test for it. Just a simple Prime number calculator. It's written in Java and tells us the time it takes to calculate the first n Prime numbers.

Optimised version below - now takes ~6.6secs

public class Primes {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        int topPrime = 150000;
        int current = 2;
        int count = 0;
        int lastPrime = 2;

        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();

        while (count < topPrime) {

            boolean prime = true;

            int top = (int)Math.sqrt(current) + 1;

            for (int i = 2; i < top; i++) {
                if (current % i == 0) {
                    prime = false;
                    break;
                }
            }

            if (prime) {
                count++;
                lastPrime = current;
            }
            if (current == 2) {
             current++;
            } else {
                current = current + 2;
            }
        }

        System.out.println("Last prime = " + lastPrime);
        System.out.println("Total time = " + (double)(System.currentTimeMillis() - start) / 1000);
    } 
}

We've pretty much lost the plot of the whole Hackintosh vs PC thing and are just having some fun with optimising it. First attempt with no optimisations (the above code has a couple) ran around 52.6min to find the first 150000 prime numbers. This optimisation is running around 47.2mins.

If you want to have a go and post your results, then stick em up.

Specs for the PC I'm running it on are Pentium D 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM, running Ubuntu 8.04.

Best Optimisation so far has been the square root of current, first mentioned by Jason Z.

Answer 1

That's a bit worse than my sieve did on a 8 Mhz 8088 in turbo pascal in 1986 or so. But that was after optimisations :)