correctness and comprehensiveness of compilers [was: Re: C compiletime]

[Dara Hazeghi]

> >   I don't know about MICO test.  But it is amazing
> for me how such
> > respectable company as Intel could make a release
> (7.1) which can not
> > compile correctly some SPECINT2000 tests (vpr and
> gcc) with -O2 and -O3
> > for P4 (their mainstream processor).  I found that
> a week ago using the
> > demo CD which we got on the gcc summit.
> > 
> > Vlad
> 
> I've noticed hardware vendor's compilers usually are
> pretty buggy. They're
> basically vehicles for getting good numbers on
> certain benchmarks, and
> often contain optimizations useless in the real
> world and/or fail to
> contain basic optimizations necessary for good
> performance on real-world
> programs.
> 
> (Evidently they don't use icc for SPEC...)

I don't know about that. Check
http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/res2003q2/cpu2000-20030422-02135.html
for instance.

In general, it seems most vendor compilers have been
almost obsessively targeted at SPEC, thus SPEC is
forced to come up with bigger and more convoluted
benchmarks, etc. etc.

One thing that amuses me is that of all the SPEC
tests, I'd say on average, machines score the lowest
on 176.gcc...

Dara

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