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Re: gcc 3.5 integration branch proposal


On Jan 20, 2004, Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@apple.com> wrote:

> On 20/01/2004, at 2:11 PM, Alexandre Oliva wrote:

>> I don't see how making GCC faster on new machines wouldn't speed
>> things up on slower machines.  Hmm...  Except for refraining from
>> recomputing stuff over and over by setting aside some memory to hold
>> the computed value.

> Typically, on older, slower machines (eg. the mentioned 300Mhz
> StrongARM), memory accesses are relatively cheap relative to
> computation.

Which means not even the tuning for big-memory systems I suggested
would improve performance on newer hardware in detriment of older
hardware.

> Thus, on newer machines it's useful to perform some computation if
> this results in smaller final data structures, but this is not true
> on older machines.

But older machines generally have little memory too, so reducing data
structures can be good for them as well.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Happy GNU Year!                     oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer


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