[lug] Various Arch/Compiler Binaries living together

[Timothy C. Klein]

* Tom Tromey (tromey at redhat.com) wrote:
> >>>>> "Ed" == Ed Hill <ed at eh3.com> writes:
> 
> Ed> Since then, I've become convinced that fussing with
> Ed> platform-specific compilation and optimization tweaks is almost
> Ed> always a waste of time.
> 
> Yeah, it is.  I think Red Hat compiles the kernel and glibc with
> architecture-specific flags, but not anything else.  Unless the code
> in question is very heavily used, the benefit is vanishingly small.
> 

While I would not be overly surprised if you two are correct, I am not
going to take your word for it :-)  If it is true, though, it would seem
to imply the following:  the only difference between the i386 and
Athlon/Pentium III/Pentium IV really boils down to clock speed (and I
guess maybe memory bandwidth / cache size).  I am not sure I buy that.
There *are* new, and more effiecent, instructions in the newer chips
(3DNow, SSE, SSE2, MMX, etc..., to name those that have catchy names).
So for the average application such things make no difference?

Have any links to scientific analysis?

Tim
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== Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net   ==
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