[Radiance-general] Fedora 12+gcc 4.4.4 performance

[Mark Stock]

Radiance folks,

I'd like to share a recent surprising result. Upgrading from gcc 
4.3.2 to 4.4.4 resulted in a ~7-15% performance boost for the 
Radiance benchmark test on my AMD Phenom system. If you have a 
similar software/hardware setup as me, and the ability to upgrade 
your compiler to gcc 4.4.4, I'd strongly suggest doing so. Also, 
if you have the time to run the benchmark, I'd like to add your 
results to the database:

http://markjstock.org/pages/rad_bench.html

My system:
AMD Phenom 9850 (4 core at 2.5 GHz)
Fedora 12, gcc 4.4.4
Radiance 4.0 (April) built with
-O2 -ffast-math -funroll-loops

Fun fact: the two benchmarks vary in difficulty by 26.6x, so we 
can calculate that an 8-core Xeon system from 2008 runs Radiance 
almost 1000x faster than the oldest computer that I've 
benchmarked: a 133MHz K-5 in 1999.

Mark