GCC 4.0, Fast Math, and Acovea

[tbp]

On 5/2/05, Scott Robert Ladd <scott.ladd@coyotegulch.com> wrote:
> 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:
While POV has an impressive array of features and is quite valuable as
a large FP intensive legacy standard for compiler writers (or
raytracer writers :), i wouldn't consider it state of the art or a
speed daemon either; to put it bluntly it's incredibly slow.

For those reasons i consider it's not representative of the kind of
computationnal performance gcc can extract from a modern CPU at all:
again, in my own experience, gcc4.x is light years away from previous
versions.

Now i'm not familiar enough with the other cited sources to comment.