Here are some facts about k6. I didn't have time to do a benchmark myself, so thanks to google I found the attached message. Hope it helps those who think i686 is better than k6 on an Athlon. IMO, it is possible that i686 carves better FP performance (because I haven't seen a test that disproves that ;), but for integer performance k6 will be good for you Athlon users... And if you look at the following page which adds athlon support to our beloved gcc-2.95.x you will see that the gains of -march=athlon over -march=pentiumpro seem to be only marginal. http://hannah.ipc.miyakyo-u.ac.jp/kim/Linux/AthlonGCC.html But there is indeed some consistent however very small speedup when using -march=athlon there. The real benefit of course comes from "real" optimizations. Since these processors are very smart and will do out-of-order processing you don't get the speedups you used to get in the 80's with these "Submodel" optimizations. :) The KDE build I did were done with "-O3 -march=i686". Now if you add to those flags -fstrict-aliasing -malign-functions=4 -fomit-frame-pointer, and add to the configure flags --enable-fast-malloc=full and --enable-final you will get quite a bit of speedup! Thanks, -- Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr> Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C
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