If you wondered why Intel sucks on Fedora read this

[Steven W. Orr]

On Saturday, May 16th 2009 at 15:00 -0000, quoth g:

=>Valent Turkovic wrote:
=>
=>> If you wondered why Intel sucks on Fedora read this article, it
=>> expains all complexities of Intel drivers and for me it shows hope
=>> that Intel drivers are becoming better.
=>
=>intel sucks on anything but ms, because intel joined the ms whore house
=>years ago along with many other oem suppliers because of their fear of
=>not being included in ms specs.
=>
=>in off quote of b.g., 'exclusively ms or be left out'.
=>
=>many 'old heads' are aware of this, and it is what has made building
=>linux drivers for a lot of good software very difficult when oem refuses
=>to release specs on systems.
=>
=>given enough time, driver writers will be able to over come the ms
=>monopoly so that there will be more hardware working in other than ms.

I need to go back and see the beginning of this thread, just in case 
anyone thinks I know what I'm talking about...

But for years now, I have had a marked preference for AMD processors. This 
is based on my past experience in compilers, especially in optimizers. 

The Intel line is so massively pipelined that it's almost impossible to 
write an optimizer that doesn't have to flush its entire cache every few 
instructions. 

Not that it matters, but the Alpha chip was one impressive processor. That 
thing could clock off as many as 6 instructions per clock tick because of 
intelligent pipelining.

The AMD line doesn't run as fast as the Intel chips on a clock-cycles per 
dollar basis, but it makes up for it in how it caches instructions. That's 
both why they're comparable and why it's even possible to write an 
optimizer for it.

Gcc is a truly amazing piece of work, and it certainly even qualifies as 
art. It supports a very wide range of architectures, but I would have to 
say that it does a better job of optimizing AMD code than Intel code. Then 
facton in that the processor itself does a better job of caching 
instructions, and you can see where I get my preferences.

-- 
Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have  .0.
happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000
individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
steveo at syslang.net