This applet randomly generates terrain for a map. There are four terrain types; water, beach, forest, and mountains. Each has a color specified in a properties file. The source is here .

For a 450x450 pixel map, random seed of 0, 10 threads, and 5000 iterations, the performance on various platforms is given below. The generation time is dominated by floating point (double) trigonometric functions. The fill time is all integer calculations. Both the generation and fill methods are loops repeated hundreds of times. 

                                                         generation   fill
cpu                          OS            JVM              time      time
---                          --            ---              -----     ----
Pentium II (233MHz)          FreeBSD 3.1   jdk1.1.7           59      5.01
                                           Kaffe 1.0.5        24      0.19
                             FreeBSD 4.0   jdk1.1.8           28      2.30
                                           jdk1.2.2           33      0.22
                             Win98         jdk1.2.2            8      0.17
Pentium II (400MHz)          Linux 2.0.36  jdk1.2             13      0.16
                                           Kaffe 1.0.5        14      0.17
                             Win98         jdk1.2.1            5      0.11
Pentium III (500MHz)         FreeBSD 3.3   jdk1.1.8           26      2.27
                                           Kaffe 1.0.5        13      0.09
                             FreeBSD 4.5   jdk1.3.1           19      1.07
Pentium III (500MHz)         Win98         IE 4.0              5      0.11
Pentium III (630MHz)         Linux 2.2.14  jdk1.1.7           10      0.86
Sparc Ultra-2 (200MHz)       SunOS 5.6     jdk1.2.1           12      0.38
                                           jdk1.1.6            8      0.34
                                           kaffe 1.0.5        31      1.35
Sparc Ultra-2 (dual 300MHz)  SunOS 5.7     jdk1.2.1            3      0.13
                             SunOS 5.8     jdk1.3.1            9      1.09
Mac G4 (400MHz)              MacOS 9       IE 5.0              7      0.11
Mac G4 (933MHz)              MacOS X       jdk1.3.1            4      0.09
Mac G5 (1.8GHz)              MacOS X       jdk1.5              2      0.04

For a 640x640 pixel map, random seed of 0, 512 threads, and 100000 iterations, the performance on various platforms is given below. 

                                                          generation    fill
 date  cpu                          OS            JVM        time       time
-----  ---                          --            ---       ------     -----
 3/05  Mac G5 (1.8GHz)              MacOS 10.4    jdk1.5    56.698     0.773
 3/08  Mac Pro (2x(2.8GHz 4core))   MacOS 10.5    jdk1.5     3.775     0.105