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Re: gcc300 vs gcc295.3 benchmarking?



>
>Did you really check this? Did you really thoroughly test the effect of
>-mpreferred-stack-boundary=X and of the other alignment switches? I'm 
>asking
>this because, in my personal experience, they are still relevant, 
>especially so
>when doubles are involved.

	Thoroughly, no. I did try -malign-double (which is included in the "optimal 
option list" I mentioned, and a few -mpreferred-stack-boundary=X values (the 
default and the apparently theoretical optimal of X=8). I also tried the new 
options like accumulate-args, etc. The effect was minimal. But I should 
mention that I tried this always with the -mcpu and -march options set to 
pentiumpro, and with a programme I wrote for benchmarking a callback 
mechanism I use extensively (= not only floating point benchmarking).
OTOH, since you mention fl.pt. alignment, I tried the integer version of the 
dhrystone test I have. No floating point operations, and yet I get the same 
pattern. -mpreferred-stack-boundary=8 gives (almost) identical performance 
(for pure integer benchmarking) between the 2 versions. I thus re-tried the 
fl.pt. benchmark. At best (with my optimal list, and -mpref-stk-bndr=8), 
gcc3 is some 7% slower than gcc 2.95.3 . It would seem that alignment is the 
main but not only cause of the performance difference.

I am a bit reluctant to use -mpreferred-stack-boundary=8 as a default, given 
the remarks about its use in libraries in the gcc manual...

Best,
RenE
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