SPEC95 performance comparison: 2.95.3 vs 3.0-20010525

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann at godzilla dot ICS dot UCI dot EDU>]

Hi!

I saw that there is some interest in comparing the performance of GCC
3.0 to previous versions, so I tried to see how it compares to
GCC-2.95.3 on the SPECINT95 benchmarks.

The results are here:

			2.95.3             3.0-20010525	
                      Base       Peak       Base       Peak 
   Benchmarks     Run Time   Run Time   Run Time   Run Time 
   ------------   --------   --------   --------   -------- 
   099.go              279        283        282        276 
   124.m88ksim         168        144        162        142 
   129.compress        181        174        176        177 
   130.li              165        171        168        171 
   132.ijpeg           205        156        215        156 
   134.perl            122        119        124        119 
   147.vortex          219        218        241        239 


The numbers represent the running time in seconds. 
A short description of the benchmarks is at the end of this message. 
(note that 126.gcc is missing, the cc1 compiled with 3.0-20010525
segfaults at runtime)

The benchmarks are compiled with 2 sets of options: 

for base: -O3
for peak: -O3 -mcpu=v8 -mtune=ultrasparc

Suggestions for other options are welcome...
(I should use -mcpu=v8 in the base configuration too. 
Why is the default instruction set v7? I doubt that there are many v7
machines still around...)

So for the base config li, ijpeg and vortex are worse for 3.0 in the
base config, compress and vortex are worse for the peak config. 

No fancy options where used to when compiling the compilers: just 
--prefix=BLAHBLAHBLAH

The machine: SUN Blade 100
Processor:   500MHz UltraSPARCIIe
RAM:         1GB
OS:          Solaris 2.8
The compilers and the benchmarks are on the local disk. 
The machine is in multi-user mode.

I could also  run the SPEC95 floating point benchmarks and report
those results too. 
I have SPEC2000 too.... 


Benchmark Descriptions:

099.go Game playing; artificial intelligence Plays the game Go
        against itself.                                                    
124.m88ksim  Simulation Simulates the Motorola 88100 processor
        running Dhrystone and a memory test program.
126.gcc  Programming & compilation Compiles pre-processed source
        into optimized SPARC assembly code.
129.compress  Compression Compresses large text files (about 16MB)
        using adaptive Limpel-Ziv coding.
130.li Language interpreter Lisp interpreter.
132.ijpeg  Imaging Performs jpeg image compression with various
        parameters.                                                        
134.perl  Shell interpreter Performs text and numeric
        manipulations (anagrams/prime number factoring).
147.vortex Database Builds and manipulates three interrelated
        databases.