In message <19990802222940.A27215@rek.tjls.com>, Thor Lancelot Simon writes:
>Rebuild the world with -O2 -mcpu=21164a -Wa,-m21164a and you'll be downright
>astounded how much faster some things go.  Since there's a huge speed boost
>for code like DES encryption that shouldn't benefit tremendously from the
>new instructions this turns on, my SWAG is that the presence of these
>instructions to do bytewise operations avoids some *other* huge lose in
>GCC on the Alpha.  Either that, or GCC's memory-latency model for the
>21164A happens to be exactly right for these boards... which I suppose is
>also quite possible.

Well, what I'll probably do is wait until the X server people at Metrolink
are done testing my i386 laptop (don't get your hopes up, it's running BSD/OS
right now), then use it to try to build -current, and once I have a buildable
-current, I'll try it on my alpha.  :)

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a try.

-s