30 Jun
2004
30 Jun
'04
10:59 p.m.
As this machine is going to spend most of it's
time doing DSP, I figured
more and high speed RAM is good and hence a faster FSB which I think
means a faster processor as well, specially at 400Mhz for the FSB but
is it worth it? Does it make a difference?
Well, if you can build your modules yourself or get Pentium-4 builds of your
software, the Pentium4 offers a ferocious DSP bang for the buck, even older
versions like the Rev-A Northwoods (400-533 FSB).
They offer SSE + SSE2 which if used to build your effects modules, can
really boost the DSP performance a significant amount.
AthlonXPs only offer SSE (SSE1).
Modern GCC's (>= 3.3) offer fairly good Pentium4 code generation quality,
but for real OOMPH! in your binaries, the Intel C compiler is the way to
performance nirvana.
gcc options as a starting point:
CFLAGS='-O2 -mfpmath=sse -msse2 -march=pentium4 -mcpu=pentium4 \
-fomit-frame-pointer -s' CXXFLAGS='-O2 -mfpmath=sse -msse2 \
-march=pentium4 -mcpu=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer -s' ./configure blah..
=MB=
--
A focus on Quality.