April 2002 Dev Tools Include gcc Update

snyperm writes "stepwise.com indicates that the April 2002 Developer Tools have been seeded to developers and is scheduled for release sometime in the coming weeks. The improvement of gcc 3.1 alone is noteworthy as arstechnica indicates there should be somewhat substantial increases in speed ahead for Mac OS X. One step closer to 10.2!" Also included, according to the story, is a ProjectBuilder 2.0 beta.

hmm

[seann]

13: 60% [FP ] 4.58s Spherical Harmonics Legendre Polynomial
13: 64% [FP ] 4.31s Spherical Harmonics Legendre Polynomial

~19%
14: 38% [INT] 15.54s Dhrystone 2.1 (500k Iterations)
14: 45% [INT] 13.18s Dhrystone 2.1 (500k Iterations)

~11%
15: 32% [FP ] 9.15s Whetstone 1.2 (1000k Operations)
15: 36% [FP ] 8.23s Whetstone 1.2 (1000k Operations)

Those are some SEXY benchmarks. (bold = new gcc)

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Several of the other tests show somewhat more of an increase when gcc is used correctly. Obviously, this compiler update will affect soem areas more thn others...especially once they optimize it for altivec ;)

~11%
89.2% 104.1% INT 3.50s Blowfish Block Cipher Encryption (448 bit key)
99.8% 124.9% INT 3.13s Blowfish Block Cipher Encryption (448 bit key)

~16%
84.2% 96.1% INT 3.71s Blowfish Block Cipher Decryption (448 bit key)
100.1% 124.9% INT 3.12s Blowfish Block Cipher Decryption (448 bit key)

~31%
32.1% 32.9% INT 17.23s Towers of Hanoi
41.0% 41.6% INT 13.50s Towers of Hanoi

~25%
76.5% 88.5% INT 3.99s Encode G.723-40 Audio 100k
96.3% 107.1% INT 3.17s Encode G.723-40 Audio 100k

i haven't looked into why this happened, the cli version is alright
62.6% 69.2% FP 4.42s Spherical Harmonics Legendre Polynomial
55.6% 65.1% FP 4.98s Spherical Harmonics Legendre Polynomial

color me puzzled

[ubiquitin]

GCC3.1 [gnu.org] still doesn't have altivech optimization, which is what is really needed at this point for a speed boost for OSX apps. Good to see the update coming, though.

Actually, it does.

[DeadMeat (TM)]

From http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-3.1/changes.html:

Altivec support has been added for the PowerPC variants that support it. See -maltivec.

OS X / GCC

[mkoz]

Does anyone know what it takes to become a primary or secondary evaluation platform? It would seem to me that it would be worth Apple's while to front the money / people to make OS X a primary or secondary evaluation platform...

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-3.1/criteria.html

Altivec?

[Lally Singh]

Odd, from the release notes:

GCC 3 has greatly improved code optimization, especially for Altivec code.

-faltivec Optimizes code for the Altivec.

Not that this release is going to be some automatically vectorizing compiler... Previous experience tells us how really hard that is. But, we can expect some basic altivec usage.

GCC changes

[Lally Singh]

These notes describe a pre-release of GCC 3, based on the GCC compiler version 3.1 for C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++. GCC 3 is the biggest change for GCC in ten years and represents two years of development. It offers the following benefits over GCC 2, the compiler that shipped with the Mac OS X 10.1 Development Tools:

• Faster compilation times due to new precompiled header mechanism. Now C++ code can take advantage of precompiled headers as well. See Precompiled Headers.
• Better code optimization and generation. If you avoided turning on optimization in the past, now would be a good time to try it again. See Optimization.
• Better C++ support. In addition to supporting precompiled headers for C++, GCC 3 contains the following improvements:
  • A stabler and more efficient application binary interface (ABI).
  • A new C++ standard library, including better support for the Standard Template Library.
  • Better compliance with the ISO C99 and ISO ANSI C++ specifications. Note that the new ABI means you need to recompile all your C++ libraries and frameworks.

This would be karma whoring if I wasn't capped out...

This has been in ArsTechnica forums for a while

[mailseth]

For some more interesting benchmarks and discussion on gcc 3.1, this discussion has been going on at ArsTechnica.com for a while:

http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a= tp c&s=50009562&f=8300945231&m=9480915224