Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: GCC beats MSVC by 50% on crafty according to german magazine!

Author: Alessandro Damiani

Date: 02:56:02 03/14/02

Go up one level in this thread


On March 13, 2002 at 22:49:35, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On March 13, 2002 at 21:50:56, James T. Walker wrote:
>
>>On March 13, 2002 at 14:12:29, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On March 13, 2002 at 00:29:21, martin fierz wrote:
>>>
>>>>aloha!
>>>>
>>>>here's something i found on a german computer magazine website:
>>>>(http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>"Under Windows we made use of Visual Studio 6 (with Service Pack 5), with which
>>>>in all probability most Windows applications have been created. The SPEC results
>>>>obtained with the new compilers such as the current GCC 3.0 or Intel's in-house
>>>>compiler are better by between ten and more than twenty percent.
>>>>[snip]
>>>>With a SPECint_base value of 306 Apple's 1 GHz machine under Mac OS X ran almost
>>>>head to head with the equally clocked Pentium III, combined with Linux and GCC,
>>>>with a SPECint_base value of 309. Under Windows, the bad quality of Microsoft's
>>>>run-of-the-mill compiler, which pushed the system down to a SPECint_base value
>>>>of 236, below the 242 value of the PowerMac running at a clock cycle of 800 MHz,
>>>>came back to haunt the Intel processor."
>>>>
>>>>and then there is the link http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/05/182/qpic01.jpg
>>>>which shows the specint crafty result which is a whopping 444 for GCC and
>>>>only 293 for MSVC.
>>>>
>>>>is this really possible?? i remember i once tried GCC for my checkers program,
>>>>and of course it's long ago, but it was clearly worse than MSVC at the time. i
>>>>just can't remember anybody posting anything like this here, GCC being 50%
>>>>faster than MSVC... but usually, this magazine is good...
>>>>
>>>>cheers
>>>>  martin
>>>>
>>>>PS: just another question: is linux 32-bit or 64-bit? can i use more than 2-4GB
>>>>ram under linux?
>>>
>>>
>>>1.  I've never seen GCC within 10% of the speed of MSVC.  I doubt it has
>>>suddenly happened.
>>>
>>>2.  Linux is _both_.  On intel (non-IA64 machines) it is a 32 bit operating
>>>system.  On 64 bit processors like that Alpha or IA64 it is a 64 bit operating
>>>system.  The RAM limit is not an OS issue, it is an architectural issue.  Except
>>>for a bizarre hack Intel added a couple of years back, the 32 bit machines are
>>>limited to 4 gigs (2^32).  With a kludge they added, this goes to 32 gigs I
>>>believe, but only for (at the time) the Xeons...
>>
>>Hello Bob,
>>Can you confirm that the P3/P4 and AMD Athlons have only 32 address lines?  My
>>understanding of microprocessors is that the memory limit is due to the number
>>of address lines and not the number of data bit lines.  Meaning that a 32 bit
>>processor can pass 32 bits in parallel but the amount of memory that it can
>>address is 2^X  where "X" is dependent on the number of address lines the cpu
>>has.  I remember the Motorola 68000 had something like 21/23 address lines even
>>though it was a 16 bit processor(Don't tie me to that exactly).  I have tried to
>>look up the Pentium and have been unable to get a pin-out of it.
>>Jim
>
>I'm not sure either.  I only know that the xeons have 4 extra bits that are
>usable, although it might be that _all_ the processors have 36 bits but they
>don't function on anything but xeons...  no idea...  I'll try to find out...

The 68000 was 32bit (defending it :). And yes, the address space was not 2^32,
as Jim wrote. IIRC something like 2^24? But I never met the limit at that
time...

Alessandro




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.