gcc & g4 processor?

[adam morley]

On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 12:51:58PM -0400, David Edelsohn wrote:
> >>>>> adam morley writes:
> 
> adam> so i was looking @ apples website, specifically what compiler they
> include with the now shipping Mac OS X.  its gcc 2.95.2.  it has a special
> option -faltivec to compile with altivec enhancements. 
> adam> is this included in regular download of gcc from one of the mirrors?
> ie, can i put it on linux ppc, openbsd, whatever, compile it and get that
> action? 
> 
> 	Motorola has not assigned the changes to the FSF, so they cannot
> be included in the FSF sources.  In the interim, the GCC infrastructure
> for supporting SIMD instructions has been improved by an Intel contract
> with Red Hat to support MMX/SSE instructions.  Apple has stated that it is
> investigating rewriting the AltiVec support from scratch without any
> Motorola IP using the new GCC SIMD infrastructure.

interesting.  this brings up another point: will there be support for things like VIS from sun?  i know sun already has a compiler which does a very very good job of optimizing, so i doubt if sun would build support into gcc.

is there a timetable for apple's altivec support?

> 
> adam> plus, how good is PPC optimization under gcc?
> 
> 	Good, not great.  It depends a lot on the type of algorithm.
> Informal performance comparisons seem to show that GCC is anywhere from
> 30% worse to 5% better than IBM's Visual Age compiler on specific
> workloads.

and im guessing this doesn't run under openbsd.

> 
> David

-- 
thanks
adam

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