PowerMac G5 performance

> > I have a dual 2ghz and a dual 2.5 and they are both running reasonably
> fast
> > but not as fast as some of my x86 machines. However, as others have
> said
> > before me I suspect the OS X binary is simply not well-optimized for our
> > platform. Perhaps in the future they will have time to tune it better
> (or
> > perhaps this project simply does not play well to the strengths of the
> G5,
> > although since it's largely doing FFTs it should be able to take
> advantage of
> > altivec). If they don't have the time to write SIMD code for a platform
> with
> > just a few percent of the market, autovectorization support is coming in
> gcc
> > 4.0 as well. :)
>
> Well, we cannot do the work on our own as the source is not available. Worse,
> they may not be using the Apple compiler. We may get lucky and Bruce will
> tell us which compiler they are using ...

We're using the Apple XCode tools (gcc 3.6). Recently one of our members has gotten altivec code running between 2 and 4 times faster under G5, partly by changing a number of internal double quantities to floats. Next week I'll do some testing to see if this new code is sufficiently accurate to use.

Bruce