[Debian-ppc64-devel] I am planning to restart ppc64 ports project.

[Hiroyuki Yamamoto]

Hi,

Brian Morris wrote:
> personally I am more interested in G4 altivec optimized packages. I
> have  a bunch of these which I have tested a few packages with and
> found 2-3 x speedups by compiling with altivec flags set.
> I realize that for G5/other64bit the floating point speed up about
> equivalent to this (in addition to the faster overall speed) however
> with my usage heavy on integer and logic operations the floating point
> does not help, but the altivec support would and save $$ upfront as
> well as in electricity usage efficiency.
> 
> That said I almost buy a g5 Xserve because those are efficient -- not
> much good for video though, anything with moving graphics has to have
> another front end machine. Also the drives are I believe nonstandard
> compared to today's 1U/2U types of rack form factor.

I also think that it's worth considering to set "-maltivec -mabi=altivec"
at CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS in buildflags.conf of the ppc64 auto-buildd machine.

If it sets so, these ppc64 packages will not support POWER4 and POWER5 CPUs.

However, I think that it is a very interesting proposal under the present situation
giving up the pcc64 former port because the performance did not go up,
and making the powerpc port to biarch.


Regards,
--
Hiroyuki Yamamoto
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