[kde-solaris] [preannouncement] KDE 3.3.1 Solaris 8/9 SPARC Forte build

[Stefan Teleman]

Feel free to time test KDE built with Forte vs KDE built with GCC, and 
post the results. Saying "30%, Come on" is not exactly computer 
science, or a counter argument.

Or, get the Forte flags from my KDE patches, write a small program 
which calculates PI 10000 times, compile i with those flags (Forte 8 
or 9), and run it.
Do the same thing with GCC, with your favorite flags, and run it.
Then please post the source code of the program, the compiler flags 
you used, and the results.

Hint: it's been done before.

Instruction prefetch _is_ supported on UltraSPARC II, not just III or 
better. And cache instruction prefetch is not the only way to achieve 
very aggressive optimizations with Forte on UltraSPARC. It's just one 
of the ways of optimizing, and there are specific ways of setting the 
optimization of prefetch-to-load and prefetch-to-store factors, and 
also specifiying cache properties. There's tons of other things one 
can do with registers, enabling the visual instruction set, pointer 
aliasing, 

I am not aware of anyone at GCC claiming they achieve the same 
optimization levels on UltraSPARC as the Sun compiler.

--Stefan

------

On Wednesday 03 November 2004 06:37, Christopher Layne wrote:
> That's great. But how about we just back this up with actual timed
> testing of KDE components and see for ourselves?
>
> -cl
>
> >   The 900 Mhz UltraSparc III-CU and later model processors has a
> >   Branch prediction logic that enables the processor to prefetch
> >   the right instructions after a branch and prevent Cache-miss
> > main memory instruction fetches.
> >   This circutry gets enabled with the "xtarget=ultra3"  or
> > "xtarget=ultra3i" ( for the UltraSparc III-i processor ) 
> > compiler directives. Then the performance differance is certainly
> >  30%. Because you avoid a large number of the execution pipeline
> > stall's that you have otherwise.
> >
> >   //Lars
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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-- 
Stefan Teleman          'Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition'
steleman at nyc.rr.com                          -Monty Python