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Re: Optimizing fron source



On Sun, Jul 22, 2001 at 07:41:56AM -0400, dude wrote:
> There was recently a thread on this aobut
> optimizing for newer chips
> but i thought i read that
> the speed increase was not worth
> the compile time.
> 
> What do others think?

The thing is, very very few packages are CPU bound enough for
optimizations to make any difference.  Most of them are slowed down by
stuff like RAM or harddrive speed.  The CPU is by far the fastest
component of a computer.  Worrying about optimizing for minor CPU
differences is simply not worth it in most cases.

There definitely are some exceptions.  I wonder if it would be worth it
to build optimized versions of stuff like image libraries (libjpeg,
libimlib, etc).  Stuff that does a lot of data manipulation is a good
candidate for optimization.

noah

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