-----Original Message----- From: Wells, Charles Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 9:48 AM To: 'Chris Wedgwood' Subject: RE: PowerMac vs. Intel for PowerPC Development Host
While I don't want to get into the Mac vs. Intel debate, I have an observations about Paul's numbers. Building kernels requires a lot of disk accesses. The Toshiba/Hitachi/IBM style hard disks that are used in most modern laptops (Mac or Intel) are notoriously slow compared to full-sized desktop hard drives (particularly the high performance SCSI drives). It wouldn't be meaningful to compare two systems without describing the access time performance of the hard disks. While I don't have the numbers in front of me, I believe the the fastest machine I have access to for building kernels is my trusty old 450 MHz. desktop G3 at home. It has 3 very fast IBM SCSI drives. In my book, how fast a kernel compiles is as much a matter of how much you're willing to spend on hard drives as it is CPU architectural considerations. Leave the "CPU clock speed comparisons" to the marketing guys. -----Original Message----- From: Chris Wedgwood [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 12:46 AM To: Paul Mackerras; Eugene Surovegin Cc: brian.auld at adic.com; linuxppc-embedded at lists.linuxppc.org Subject: Re: PowerMac vs. Intel for PowerPC Development Host On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 12:22:52PM +1100, Paul Mackerras wrote: > As an actual data point: my measurements show that a dual 1GHz G4 > powermac is more than twice as fast at compiling PPC kernels as a > 1.7GHz P4 (single cpu). Wow... that's *much* better that I would have guessed. Is the compiler the same for each? > You can't fairly compare compiling a PPC kernel on a PPC box with > compiling an x86 kernel on an x86 box. GCC does more work compiling > for PPC than for x86. I wasn't trying to compare fairly, mostly get the lowest possible compile time. On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 09:10:48PM -0800, Eugene Surovegin wrote: > I tried to compile the _same_ PPC kernel for one of boards (440GP > based). > Cross compiling on PIII 755Mhz running SuSE - 16 min > Cross compiling on G4 PowerBook 1Ghz running YDL - 6 min I don't have a PPC host to reasonably compare with, but a 440GP kernel (linuxppc_2_4_devel) for me builds in 3 minutes 29s (with gcc-2.95). ** Sent via the linuxppc-embedded mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/
