On Sat, 2003-03-29 at 22:19, Adam Williamson wrote: > On Sun, 2003-03-30 at 04:21, Leon Brooks wrote: > > On Sunday 30 March 2003 04:31, Adam Williamson wrote: > > > Don't start crying "gentoo!", because if you get speed boosts via > > > gentoo it's generally by using very aggressive compilation options, > > > not by targetting your own processor architecture. > > > > And there is a problem with that? As in, would your Mandrake distribution go > > all morbid on you for being rebuilt with a --too-much-testosterone option? > > No, but I'd guess Mandrake has less aggressive compilation options for a > reason. Would the distro actually all build right with more aggressive > ones?
How about a slightly tangent viewpoint. http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030217/index.html Here at toms they do a shootout of 65 processors from 100mhz to screamers. The most interesting thing is the 100mhz cpu with a monster GeForce video card and 512Mb ram that rocks with UT2003. The point is. Yes there is something you can get out of optimization of software for a specific usage, hardware. IF you have a very narrow usage band. When I was working for a realtime video company we would optimize the heck out of software for exactly what we did. It ran faster. But, it didn't do a dang bit of good for the box in general and in fact tended to make a number of programs we didn't use slower. (Most notably if I remember right MySQL and other DataBases slowed way down if we ran it on one of our optimized boxes.) A large move like i386 to i586 is significant for a number of apps. Some ... it really doesn't help. But to be honest. A better video card and more ram does more in a case like this than anything else. Want a real optimization. Buy a CPU with a larger L1 cache. Makes a huge difference. James
