Re: gEDA-user: Icarus Verilog building from CVS

[Dave McGuire <mcguire-atMUNGEDneurotica_dot_com>]

On Aug 6, 2004, at 9:53 PM, John Sheahan wrote:
>>> What sorts of gains do you hope for, adding more compilers?
>>
>>   - compatibility with other platforms (there are machines other than 
>> x86 boxes out there)
>
>> - compatibility with compilers whose output is much faster than GCC
>
>         -Dave
>
> While gcc seems to do a great job of supporting multiple platforms, 
> there does seem to be
> the occasional performance question.

   Yup.  I believe it's really a multiplatform vs. performance tradeoff.

   However, since Steve was forward-thinking enough to use the GNU 
autoconf system for configuration, these compiler and platform 
differences can be handled relatively easily.  Lots of packages Just 
Work when you type "./configure" and don't have GCC installed.  It's 
just a matter of getting those little compile-time issues resolved, and 
scrubbing the code for the nonstandard GCCisms which invariably creep 
into software these days.

   I think the next trick will be cranking the air conditioning a little 
cooler and talking Joshua into attempting a port to Unicos on the Cray. 
  Now THAT would be interesting. ;)

> I for one would be interested in hearing the order of performance 
> improvements possible
> by compiler choice. In many applications verilog throuput is important.

   One data point that I have involves an image processing system I 
wrote that grabs frames (NTSC, full-motion video) from multiple video 
cameras and chews on them in real time.  When eating frames from 16 
cameras, it eats ~48% of the CPU in a Sun Netra X1 (400MHz 
UltraSPARC-IIe) when compiled with GCC, and ~29% when compiled with 
Sun's compiler.

           -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "...it's a matter of how tightly
Cape Coral, FL             you pull the zip-tie."       -Nadine Miller