> I do all of my presieving and some of my testing for > my PIES project on a pre-EV6 alpha. No, it's not > exactly mission critical, but it _is_ high performance, > and it is FP code. (And it doesn't depend on IEEE > nappy-changing as it doesn't shit itself.) > http://primes.utm.edu/bios/top20.php?type=project&by=PrimesRank > Performance is very important to me, with the rider that > I can only run code on machines I can afford (or borrow). I would argue that you are the exception. I doubt everyone is doing what you are doing. Is this custom code that you control or is this done with a Debian package? I'm certain that you use Debian libraries, etc. Also, if FP performance is so key to you, why hasn't Debian migrated to using 'ccc' on all applications? There is a very noticeable FP performance gain there (diminished with newer versions of gcc I'll admit). > Many of the modern applications assumemuch more than IEEE, they > assume you've got a honking great processor with vast tracts of > RAM. My EV56 is brought to a crawl by GIMP, and Mozilla takes > 30s to load -- I wouldn't wish running those on a anyone with a > 150MHz Jenson. Hmm - my EV56 is not brought to a crawl by any of the above. (although I still consider my EV56 a honking processor, and I did spend $100 a while back to upgrade to 1GB of RAM and I'm using decent SCSI drives - IDE on those machines is pretty poor). > So when am I going to 'inherit' an EV6+? And off whom? > I'd dearly like to know, and dearly like it to be soon. Check eBay - they are there all the time. > Elitist nerdy schmuck Phil Alpha has always been relegated to realm of elitist schmucky nerds. That's why it never sold well - I spent my entire career at DEC trying to make Alpha more palatable to the masses and this is the exact kind of stuff we ran into all the time. Either you want something to work or you do not. As time goes on, developers are not going to bend to the will of what they consider to be the "quirkiness" of the pre-EV6 Alpha FP behavior. How many other architectures in the Debain world are subject to these FP restrictions? ...tom
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