Acovea 4, with Pentium 4 and Opteron results

[Scott Robert Ladd]

Yes, I'm at it again.

     http://www.coyotegulch.com/acovea/acovea_4.html

The latest version of Acovea uses a XML configuration files to increase 
its flexibility. And now that I have an Opteron system, I was able to 
test GCC 3.4 for AMD64 running 64-bit Linux  — something many readers 
have been asking for. Using a larger and revised benchmark suite, I 
performed fresh tests on my Pentium 4 systems, comparing Acovea's 
results on different platforms.

Acovea includes configuration files for GCC 3.3 and 3.4 running on 
Opteron, Pentium 3, and Pentium 4 processors. These files can easily be 
copied and modified to test other compilers, hardware platforms, and 
option sets.

The new results were a bit mixed for the Pentium 4, where I tested the 
-ffast-math options for the first time. -funsafe-math-optimizations is 
so "optimistic" that it masks the effects of other options. Even so, 
Acovea was able to find several options sets that improved upon the 
predefined -O settings.

For the Opteron, Acovea produced clear results, improving the overall 
execution time of the benchmark suite by around 10% over the same code 
compiled with -O3 -ffast-math.

Acovea is an optimization tool, similar in purpose and scope to 
profiling. Traditional function-level profiling can identify the 
algorithms most influential in a program's performance; Acovea can then 
be applied to those algorithms to find the compiler flags that generate 
the fastest code. Acovea also tests combinations of flags for 
pessimistic interactions, and stresses compiler reliability.

..Scott

-- 
Scott Robert Ladd
Coyote Gulch Productions (http://www.coyotegulch.com)
Software Invention for High-Performance Computing