*sigh* So, after a bit more experimentation, I'm not seeing much of a difference.
I built the nbench-byte benchmarking program (BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95) Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97) Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)), available from <http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~mayer/linux/bmark.html>. I compiled it with CFLAGS set to -s -static -Wall -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops. LINKFLAGS was left empty for the first build, changed to -L/usr/local/lib/mass -lmass for a build with the IBM libmass library, and to -L/usr/local/lib/libmoto -lmoto for a build with the Motorola libmoto library. I then ran them once on my system (PowerCenter 132; 132 MHz 604e; 80 MB of RAM), while running X, Communicator, Emacs, exmh, and a bunch of gnome-terminals. (Not the ideal test environment, but the results make it pretty clear that it doesn't really matter.) The results were less than impressive: =========================================================================== Iterations per second ---------------------------------------------------- Test No math library IBM libmass Motorola libmoto ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Numeric Sort 48.163 48.162 48.261 String Sort 5.0966 5.0686 5.1025 Bitfield 14,750,000 14,645,000 14,714,000 FP Emulation 5.8247 5.8366 5.8298 Fourier 774.03 772.82 2961.3 Assignment 0.81995 0.80723 0.77013 Idea 305.93 306.75 307.22 Huffman 89.318 89.414 89.351 Neural Net 1.5674 1.565 2.0439 LU Decomposition 27.715 29.364 29.943 Original Bytemark Results ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Integer Index 2.559 2.554 2.539 Floating-Point Index 1.471 1.498 2.579 Linux Data ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Memory Index 0.532 0.528 0.521 Integer Index 0.732 0.733 0.734 Floating-Point Index 0.816 0.831 1.430 =========================================================================== Of note is the fact that there is very little difference between the benchmark results with no extra math library and with the libmoto library except for the Fourier transform test, where there's a pretty dramatic difference (improvement of about 3X with libmoto over no special library). Using the IBM library actually resulted in *poorer* performance overall, especially noticeable in the Fourier transform. That appears to be because the IBM library, as provided, doesn't work with Linux. I also tried compiling various xscreensaver hacks with libmoto, and compared their performance with the performance of hacks without libmoto. I couldn't see any difference. So much for that. CMC +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ C.M. Connelly [EMAIL PROTECTED] SHC, DS +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
