GCC 4.0, Fast Math, and Acovea

[Scott Robert Ladd]

tbp wrote:

>Shameless plug with my own performance analysis regarding SSE on x86-64.
>I've ported my coherent raytracer which mostly uses intrinsics in the
>hot path (and no transcendentals).
>While gcc4.x compiled binaries are ~5% slower than those compiled with
>icc8.1 on ia32 (best case), it's the other way around on x86-64 if not
>more (on my opteron with icc8.1 and beta 9.0).
>Obviously there's much less pressure on the (cough weak cough)
>register allocator and in the end the generated code is way leaner.
>  
>
You might want to a look at my just-published review of GCC 4.0, where I 
compare it's performance on some well-known applications, including LAME 
and POV-Ray, on Pentium 4 and Opteron. In terms of POV-Ray, 4.0 produced 
a smaller executable that was slightly slower than did 3.4.3. You can 
find the full review at:

        http://www.coyotegulch.com/reviews/gcc4/index.html

..Scott